https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2616-5826
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ABSTRACT
This essay engages with recent scholarship on the epistemology of AI, data and automation, to assert how these practices are becoming increasingly central both to the projects of monitoring and of managing a global environment. We also review Jürgen Renn’s recent contribution The Evolution of Knowledge (2020) in relation to the history of environmental data. Using Renn as point of departure, we stake out a way for understanding the Anthropocene through the interaction between data and environment, taking into account the deeper political implications of datafication. We conclude with discussions about how historians of technology and environment could play an important role in assessing the opportunities and risks of AI for global environmental justice before their full-scale implementation is a fait accompli. In face of the Anthropocene, there is a general need today for integrative efforts of bridging knowledge from natural, technical, social and humanistic domains, and therefore a strong imperative for humanistic studies to transposetools, methodologies, and insights into the realms of policymaking, and legislation. Thus, assessments of AI and environment must account for these historical processes in the present as well as offer critical analysis of the full ontological spectrum from object to epistemology via data and mediation.
KEYWORDS:
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Notes
1. Edwards, Vast Machine.
2. Wickberg et al., “The Mediated Planet.”
3. Disco and Kranakis, eds., Cosmopolitan Commons.
4. Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene.
5. Ensmenger, “The Environmental History of Computing.”
6. Creutzig et al., “Digitalisation and the Anthropocene.”
7. Jones, “Characterising the Digital Twin.”
8. Bye, “Digital Twin of the Ocean.”
9. Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene.”
10. Malm and Hornborg, “The geology of mankind?”; and Barua, “Plantationocene: A Vegetal Geography.”
11. See Peters and Wickberg, “Media: The Case of Spain and New Spain.”
12. Warde, Sörlin, and Robin, The Environment.
13. Wickberg, “Environing Media and Cultural Techniques.”
14. Bender et al., “On the Danger of Stochastic Parrots.”
15. Jaton, The Constitution of Algorithms.
16. Chun et al., Pattern Discrimination.
17. O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction.
18. Sörlin and Wormbs, “Environing Technology.”
19. Wickberg and Gärdebo, “Where Humans and the Planetary Conflate”; and Wickberg and Gärdebo, eds., Environing Media.
20. Vinuesa et al., “The Role of Artificial Intelligence.”
21. Wooldridge, “Artificial Intelligence Requires more than Deep Learning.”
22. Krafft et al., “Defining AI in Policy vs Practice.”
23. See note 21 above.
24. Crawford, Atlas of AI.
25. Ibid., 66.
26. Crawford and Joler, Anatomy of an AI System; and Jones-Imhotep, “Ghost Factories.”
27. Tegmark, Life 3.0, 121–5.
28. Couldry and Mejias, The Costs of Connection.
29. Joppa and Herweijer, “How AI can enable a Sustainable Future.”
30. Belkher and Elmeligi, “Assessing ICT Global Emissions Footprint”; and Bender et al., “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots.”
31. Dasgupta, The Economics of Biodiversity.
32. Global Sustainable Development Report 2019, 94.
33. Renn, Evolution of Knowledge, 397.
34. Mullaney et al., eds., Your Computer is on Fire, 20.
35. See note 13 above.
36. Grain, Digital Control.
37. Prakash et al., “Roundtable”; Gärdebo, “Environmental History of Science.”
38. Renn, Evolution of Knowledge, 146.
39. Ibid., x.
40. Ibid., xi.
41. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries.
42. Arthur, “Tech Giants.”
43. Gitelman and Jackson, “Introduction,” 1–14.
44. Stark and Hoffman, “Data is the New What?”
45. See Crawford, Atlas of AI; and Sadowski, “When Data is Capital.”
46. Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism.
47. Renn, Evolution of Knowledge, 328, 398.
48. Edwards, “Some Say the Internet should have never Happened.”
49. Terranova, After the Internet.
50. Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism.
51. Mazzucato et al., “Public Value.”
52. Renn, Evolution of Knowledge, 33.
53. Ibid., 234, 398–9.
54. Ibid., 395.
55. Ibid., 400, 403.
56. Ibid., 403.
57. Pielke, The Honest Broker, 31.
58. See note 32 above.