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Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Climate Change: Some Anthropological Questions by Prof Akhil Gupta
Wed, 2024-10-23 21:16 — venkatr
Bio: Akhil Gupta is a Distinguished Professor of social and cultural anthropology at UCLA, working on questions of artificial intelligence, transnational capitalism, infrastructure, and corruption. His research projects have led him from studying agriculture to state development agencies to multinational corporations and now to AI and infrastructure. By combining cultural and sociological analyses of institutions and social life with questions raised by postcolonial theory, he uses rigorous and intensive ethnographic research as a basis to rethink some major questions in social theory dealing with space, place, and temporality. His publications include Red Tape (2011), The Promise of Infrastructure (2018, co-edited with Nikhil Anand and Hannah Appel), and The Anthropology of Corruption (2018, co-edited with Sarah Muir). His forthcoming book on the outsourcing industry in India is titled The Future of Futurity (with Purnima Mankekar).
Location and Date:
13 Sep 2024 (Friday), 3 PM, DESE seminar Room, 2nd Floor
In this talk, I look at the promise and perils of using AI in the arena of climate change through an analysis of the energy sector, and electricity in particular. AI can help mitigate climate change in different ways. AI “solutions” to the climate crisis are ultimately dependent on the categories in which data is collected for algorithmic operations. What are the implications for AI of the anthropological truism that different cultures and societies classify the world in different ways? How would a postcolonial and decolonial AI challenge the basic presuppositions on which solutions to the climate crisis are being thought?
Bio: Akhil Gupta is a Distinguished Professor of social and cultural anthropology at UCLA, working on questions of artificial intelligence, transnational capitalism, infrastructure, and corruption. His research projects have led him from studying agriculture to state development agencies to multinational corporations and now to AI and infrastructure. By combining cultural and sociological analyses of institutions and social life with questions raised by postcolonial theory, he uses rigorous and intensive ethnographic research as a basis to rethink some major questions in social theory dealing with space, place, and temporality. His publications include Red Tape (2011), The Promise of Infrastructure (2018, co-edited with Nikhil Anand and Hannah Appel), and The Anthropology of Corruption (2018, co-edited with Sarah Muir). His forthcoming book on the outsourcing industry in India is titled The Future of Futurity (with Purnima Mankekar).