Ecology + Artificial Intelligence: Rethinking a Planetary AI

This event will be held in English.

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AI and digital systems have become ubiquitous, promising an unobstructed path towards a rational and luminous future.

This postulate has remained largely unchallenged as digital systems colonize and ‘optimize’ our existence, designing our lives for us, largely invisibly and without our consent, according to a narrow vision of the world that privileges consumer consumption, profit-making, and population management above all else. Furthermore, the abstractness or 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.

It is time to reassess our relationship to systems that dictate the gradual ‘automatization’ of the earth for our purported benefit, especially when these systems are not inevitable but the objects of deliberate design. By becoming more aware of and drawing on the various natural intelligences that already exist and in which we in fact are deeply entangled, we can start conceiving alternative modes of existence to the digitally dictated ones that have been imposed on us.

Speaker

Dr. Audrey Borowski is a Research Fellow on the ‘Desirable AI’ project between the universities of Bonn and Cambridge. She gained her doctorate from the University of Oxford. She publishes regularly and her first book, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press.

Organizer

Columbia Global Centers | Paris addresses pressing global issues that are at the forefront of international education and research: agency and gender; climate and the environment; critical dialogues for just societies; encounters in the arts; and health and medical science.

Venue

Nestled in the Montparnasse district, Reid Hall hosts several Columbia University initiatives: Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia Undergraduate Programs, M.A. in History and Literature, and the GSAPP Shape of Two Cities Program. This unique combination of resources is enhanced by our global network whose mission is to expand the University's engagement the world over through educational programs, research initiatives, regional partnerships, and public events.

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of Columbia Global Centers | Paris or its affiliates.

Host or Publisher Columbia Global Centers | Paris