At first glance, the intersections of materiality, migrations, and artificial intelligence are difficult to locate. This is intentional – AI has been sold to us as an immaterial technology. The owners of AI companies strategically portray it as abstract and even magical because if we looked more closely at AI systems, we would see its material costs: unethical labor in the Global South, environmentally disastrous mining and shipping, data centers being built in vulnerable communities through backdoor deals with government officials, and more. Across the globe, workers are mining the metals that make computer chips, assembling components in factories, transporting them overseas, clearing land for and building data centers, labeling disturbing content produced by AI systems, and scavenging enormous piles of our e-waste, all for little or even no pay. Many of these workers are migrants and members of environmentally and economically vulnerable communities.Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, has extended both the reality and metaphor of immigration and AI in thoughtful and provocative ways. In podcasts and public talks, he argues that while societal fears of immigrants taking jobs, altering culture, and having divided loyalties may not be true of human immigrants, they definitely apply to the “AI immigrants” who will do all three. He fears we are heading towards AI border guards, bankers and teachers. The challenge, he notes, is how a human-AI hybrid society can be envisaged that does not concede control to non-organic agents.Many thinkers and scholars have begun to engage with these and other scenarios. Examining the human and environmental costs of AI systems through a lens of embodied media reading is an act of resistance. Kate Crawford’s scholarship and art forms the foundation of this work. Throughout the year, we will travel across the globe to uncover these realities. So far, we have begun with reactions to AI advertisements here in NYC and moved to migrant e-waste workers in Ghana. We have also explored how everyday citizens have been empowered to document their own histories with technology. Moving forward, we will observe how they choose to engage with or reject AI and create new movements within the spectrum of resistance.With AI data centers having been a key issue in the U.S. midterm elections that just took place, it is an especially exciting time to conduct this research. Will the “blue wave” lead to regulation of the AI industry and support for alternative AI models that are less environmentally harmful than hyperscale projects? It is also a frightening time to be engaging so deeply with AI. Will it lead to mass unemployment or even the deaths of hundreds of million people, as prophesized by Bill Gates? Some industry leaders have declared that AI could bring about the end of the human race. One thing is for certain: the window for regulating AI is closing. We don’t want to miss it, allowing tragedies to take place and play out in civil courts as with social media. The time to act is now.Click on the links below to browse through the datasets we’ve assembled.
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In Kate Crawford’s book Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, Crawford critically examines and reveals the material realities of artificial intelligence through a text-based “atlas.” Crawford defines the atlas not merely as a neutral way to represent data but as a collection of aesthetic choices that offer different ways to interpret the data. She frames the maps that make up atlases as collective visions that can be mixed and matched, producing new connections. Ways of organizing and presenting information, like labeling territory on a map or classifying humans in a dataset, are expressions of power. This reflects how, despite popular notions to the contrary, artificial intelligence systems are not objective – they reproduce the power structures under which they are formed and reflect the biases of their creators and the datasets on which they are trained. Read more . . .
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During my commutes, I’ve noticed advertisements for AI products or that use AI imagery on subway cars, in transfer tunnels, and in stations. I’ve made a practice of pausing to take photos of them. What I’m really looking for is not just the ads themselves but where people have interacted with them somehow using graffiti, stickers, etc. Like data centers, subway ads are a form of AI made manifest that people can grasp at and push against – a proxy for the tech billionaire oligarchs that people are tired of, angry at, and oppressed by. People may not be able to resist using AI at their jobs when they are required to and they may not be able to redistribute wealth in a more equitable way (at least not in the immediate future), but they can express their disapproval of suspected or real “AI slop” by writing on ads. Read more . . .
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Each year, migrants in search of opportunity make their way to Accra, the capital of Ghana, from northern Ghana and neighboring countries like Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. Thousands end up in Agbogbloshie, a makeshift settlement within Accra nicknamed “Sodom and Gomorrah” by locals. In order to survive, they make their living by scavenging metals from the e-waste dump there and selling them to scrappers. The informal recycling system is mostly tolerated by the local government, but this way of life is still precarious and dangerous. Workers are regularly evicted without warning, forced to watch powerlessly as their homes are demolished with their belongings inside them. Government officials cite the toxicity of the dump as the reason for the sudden evictions. Often these redevelopment projects are funded by donors in the name of helping the scrappers, but these projects exclude the voices of the people they are supposed to assist. Like e-waste in our country, the residents of Agbobgbloshie are treated as disposable and invisible. Read more . . .
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Upcoming
Spring, 2027
Sinha Fellow Cat Tassini will also be producing a new multimedia project about resistance for the M2Lab website. Stay tuned!
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These updates developed as part of the Sinha Memorial Fellowship, which is awarded yearly through The New School’s graduate program in Media Studies at Parsons.