Guest Talk: “Epistemic Infrastructures in the Social Metabolism with Nature – Towards an Ecological Genealogy of Artificial Intelligence”

This paper develops a heuristic for understanding the material and symbolic interactions between artificial intelligence (AI) and the natural environment. Against an understanding of AI as the basis of an “immaterial” economy, it is conceptualized here as an epistemic infrastructure regulating the social metabolism with nature. However, in this metabolism, nature is not just a static stock of resources but dynamically affects the development of AI itself. This interaction can be understood as an iterative process of externalization and internalization, which is reconstructed in the article through a discussion of the environmental history of AI. Highlighting the ambivalence of AI’s environmental role, the paper argues for its potential as a sensitizing device that could foster new forms of ecological governance, while critiquing its complicity in accelerating environmental degradation.

About the Speaker

Simon is Guest Professor for the Digitalization of Work at Technical University of Berlin and is leading the research project "Ecological Obstinacy" at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. In his recent book "Stoffwechselpolitik" [Metabolic Politics] (Suhrkamp, 2024) he develops a heuristic for understanding politics of production as environmental politics, building on an environmental history of industrialized work. Previously, Schaupp was Guest Professor at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology and senior researcher and lecturer at the University of Basel. A sociologist by training, Schaupp's research focusses on issues of work, digitalization and the ecological crisis.