About the Talk
How should we study something like "AI"—a subject of social and capital investment that rests more on speculative promises than given technologies or use cases? A committed focus on infrastructure and material throughputs is one possibility, yet the pace and breadth of current rates of AI's data centre expansion make it hard to parse the whole of this unfolding and geographically differentiated story.
This talk will experiment with a slightly different approach, inverting our temporal horizons to sketch what these infrastructures might mean and do in the future, as industrial ruins. It takes as a foundational premise that current AI development efforts can be characterized as a financial bubble, with irrational investment and unproven use cases, that will eventually pop. When it does, it will leave behind large quantities of energy and compute infrastructures that presume fixed forms of use. Some will be amenable to salvage and reappropriation into other ways of living; others will persist only as waste.
Drawing on political economic analyses of the tech sector, as well as a broader set of speculative fabulation practices by fellow data centre scholars, the talk will place AI in the past tense in order to assess both what it was and what it can become.
Dr. Anne Pasek is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture and the Environment at Trent University. She studies the cultural politics of climate change and its intersections with the digital tech sector.