Occupying Urgency: How AI Solutionism Shapes the Narrating of Urgency around the Climate Crisis

Abstract: Climate data narrates the climate crisis and its urgency, which is crucial to mitigate its effects and urge for preventive and globally aligned actions. However, climate data is bound to powerful technologies known as artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML); these are not neutral storytellers but powerful narrators. Lately, AI has fostered a new 'culture of prediction', but such culture does not only provide us with large-scale information about climate events but also manoeuvres between nudging us to urgency while also manifesting institutional and corporate power. One way to critique the power and expansion of AI is by looking closely at how it occupies urgency narratives. This means discussing the narratives of urgency that drive the use of AI as ‘a solution’ in relation to the colonialist power of AI as ‘an industry’. On the one hand, we see AI as a mediator of urgency, one that is otherwise not representable. For instance, algorithmic modelling helps us explore the causality and dynamics of climate data globally, and AI can heighten space-time resolutions and clarify stochastic aspects. On the other hand, we see the role of AI as a dominator over (situated) urgency that uses climate narratives to implement Western techno-solutionism by claiming total power over global predictions. In the latter, AI stands for more than the attempt to mediate a global urgency but for an attempt to implement corporate powers and colonialist narratives into climate narratives. By exploring how AI moves between shaping and dominating climate urgency, we discuss the epistemic shift in thinking urgency as human experience of time to that of using urgency to justify a kairopolitical technology.

Author bios: Eugenia Stamboliev is a postdoctoral scholar of ethics of technology and media at the University of Vienna. As a fellow in the WWTF project 'Interpretability and Explainability as Drivers to Democracy', she explores the political power of complex algorithmic models. Her work equally looks at the explainability of AI and political authority, and how to think dis/trust in platform labour.

Mark Coeckelbergh is a Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna since 2015 and was Vice Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Education until 2020.

Recorded Presentation | 28 April 2023

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