Dreaming with AI from a Broken Earth: The Tangled Timelines of Digital Damage

"Dreaming with AI from a Broken Earth: The Tangled Timelines of Digital Damage"

Thursday, Oct. 17, 3 p.m. Haley Center 3184/94

The Department of English and University Writing are pleased to host Dustin Edwards for a talk on the environmental impact of artificial intelligence. 

The marketing pitch for artificial intelligence insists rapid advancements in computing will unleash untold prosperity. To parrot the language of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, if pushed to a large enough scale, AI will let us — all of us — dream a life where we are limited only by our imaginations. What seldom makes its way into the profit-driven hype of AI, however, is the vast planetary infrastructure required to “dream with AI.” The droning hum of the data center imposes this sonic reminder: our digital present requires constant and finite sources of energy, water, labor, and minerals to keep the servers running smoothly. AI dreams are also environmental nightmares that are experienced in a thick tense of past, present and future.

In this presentation, Dustin Edwards tracks current AI infrastructure to the open pit mine. Drawn from his forthcoming book, Enduring Digital Damage: Rhetorical Reckonings for Planetary Survival, the talk will place the big tech visions for AI within a deeper extractive web of damage and defiance. Digital infrastructures, Edwards argues, exist on a tangled timeline: they are an outgrowth of a long line of settler colonial structural projects that have had, and continue to have, a ruinous relationship with land, water and emplaced communities. Yet, the talk will also insist that our present moment of AI hype and doom can be enriched by amplifying prehistories of refusal in the extractive frontiers that have made advanced computation possible. The political undergrounds forged from the open pit mine testify to an abolitionist imagination that demands this overly extractive world can be otherwise.

More information about Edwards can be found on this page. Email universitywriting@auburn.edu with any questions.