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So, I was able to take part in a fascinating online workshop on urban artificial intelligence (urban AI). We were quite a mixed bag of social scientists, designers, IT developers, and humanities academics from Finland, the Netherlands, India, Taiwan, Switzerland, USA etc. This made the event particularly stimulating, because it opened up the horizon for imaginaries of AI in the urban everyday around the world, and not just according to the Californian model.

Some of the recurring themes were post-binary imaginaries of future cities that go beyond the usual utopian/dystopian prophesies, and investigations into the intertwining of human and non-human agency in urban contexts around the world. This is a different approach than endlessly critiquing “smart cities” as corporate-driven (which they originally were, but many smart city projects have responded to academic critique; for instance the smart city strategy in Basel, Switzerland is not aimed at technology for technology’s sake, but at using technological tools towards more sustainable cities).

I particularly liked Stephanie Sherman‘s input against the inflationary use of Bentham’s panopticon to describe the surveillance state, as hailed in by Foucault and more recently updated by Zuboff. It ignores the current lack of centralised state power (I take this to be due to the rise of supranational companies), and the fact that it is not only surveillance enabling technology that is disciplining, but that civilisation as such has a disciplining function (for better or worse). She and her fellow researchers and designers at UC San Diego investigate plural AI ecologies in interaction with human, mineral, vegetative etc. agency. Nitin Sawhney‘s input on value-based ecologies and embracing interactions between human, AI and other non-human agency (such as granting the status of legal personhood to a river in New Zealand) went in a similar direction. My own contribution was on a case study of the use of AI in Basel to mediate motion in cities.

As you might be able to tell, the discussions had a distinctly Actor-Network theory flavour, which doesn’t bother me. In any case, the workshop will be repeated in the future. There was discussion of it taking place entirely outside of Europe or North America, to really bring in completely different perspectives on urban AI, such as in Bangalore, India. But it is not yet decided. It would definitely be super exciting, if it did, since really I hope research some more on India.