Recap #3 Digital Earth Talks x Maya Indira Ganesh

Break with modes of knowledge-production that do not serve you, and set your own terms for engaging with new technologies
written by Nora N. Khan and Digital Earth

In her research on the language and metaphors of AI, Maya Indira Ganesh  frequently splits open the category of human. She asks how we can understand the human in relation to the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and further, how can we understand the human evolving in direct relation to the geopolitical, the social, and cultural aspects of technology. In discussion with the Digital Earth Fellows, Ganesh brought together often disparate fields of knowledge to discuss the figure of the human as we understand it today. 

Currently, Ganesh explained, the imagination of AI is informed by both exclusionary and violent definitions of the human, and simultaneously, is shaped by a fear of the erasure of the human by AI’s superiority. She critically foregrounded the popular imagination of the development of AI as, eventually, a ‘super-human’ figure or entity. She juxtaposed this fantasy alongside the proliferation of social justice movements fighting and advocating for basic human rights. In doing so, she demonstrated an urgent need for a renewed notion of the humane, along with the category of human, in which human, and being humane, are not concepts limited, as now, by the neoliberal state. 

Engaging with AI is to engage with vast and complex systems of knowledge, including language; we must work, Ganesh argues, to understand the language we use about AI and technology, in order to have a chance at setting the very terms for engaging with new technologies. Ganesh examines the language that constitutes the current technological imagination in order to move beyond it. She brings forth what sort of metaphors we are in need of around AI, and which ones can be discarded.

Engaging with AI is to engage with vast and complex systems of knowledge, including language; we must work to understand the language we use about AI and technology, in order to have a chance at setting the very terms for engaging with new technologies.

In particular, it is the linguistic and metaphorical imaginary of a perfect ‘autonomy’ that creates an even more ambivalent conception of AI. Ganesh reminds us that “there is nothing really [like true] independence and autonomy and self-reliance when mutual aid is all that keeps us going.” In conversation with the Digital Earth Fellows, she encouraged them and all listeners to “make messy theories” about technological change, and stressed that art and culture have a significant role in shaping technology. She noted that shaping technology should be taken up as a matter of intentional speculation. In the discussion, the Fellows traversed questioning the notion of the human, analyzing language and metaphors as they shape limits and possibilities of technological futures, and debated how to expand the boundaries of disparate knowledge systems that are so firmly and jealously guarded.

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