Risk, Environment and AI: from Fantasies of ‘Simulationism’ to Technoauthoritarianism

Speaker
ISA Visiting Fellow - Audrey Borowski

Research Fellow Cambridge University/University of Bonn

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The problem of navigating a radically contingent and unpredictable world which in many respects eludes conceptual capture is not new – taken on new urgency and over the past two decades the digital has increasingly shifted from the calculation and prediction to the speculation about and preemption of fear-inducing futures. This largely takes place through the gradual ‘automatization’ of the earth and the new form of metaphysics it relies on: AI and digital systems have become ubiquitous, promising an unobstructed path towards a rational and luminous future. Beneath this fiction, however, the disembodiedness of the 'cloud' is an illusion that conceals a deeply material substructure, involving the extraction of rare-earth minerals, the replication of colonial exploitation, and colossal energy consumption. This constant planetary experimentation and speculation – often with financial interests at stake – reshapes our very understanding of the earth in terms of constant simulation, speculation, and digital twinning. Vying primarily towards risk management, efficiency and optimization, it exerts a form of algorithmic violence on populations and the environment alike, and helps incubate new politics, especially technopopulism, which decides, ultimately, which humans are disposable and which are not.