Public debate on artificial intelligence is marked by hopes and fears around the possibility of artificially generated human-like intelligence, extraordinary economic growth prospects, mass technological unemployment, and worsening environmental pressures. Tech industry representatives herald a faster, more productive and dematerialised future, powered by data capture and processing. Governments are increasingly speaking of the importance of responsible or ethical AI, and how to regulate to these ends.
Yet these discourses often mask the material nature of AI. This includes the labour that takes place within AI value chains, composed of millions of workers worldwide, as well as the critical mineral, energy, and water resources required to produce chips, power data centres, and keep servers cool. AI-supported performance analysis is also driving the surging efficiency of fossil fuel extraction. The gendered and racialised effects of AI materialise at and across borders and through bureaucracies as private and public actors profile, surveil, and govern different populations. Increasingly, researchers are identifying and analysing such socio-ecological, exclusionary, and extractive features of AI, as well their accompanying power relations. In doing so, ways of imagining AI otherwise – how it operates, and for whom – are emerging to challenge the status quo.
Engaging with these issues, the 2025 End-of-year event of the Centre on Labour Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) will focus on the multi-faceted materialities of AI, seeking to ground the analysis of this technology in its social, ecological and infrastructural dimensions. The event will include presentations that address these hidden landscapes of AI, their costs to workers and the environment, and the possibilities for countering dominant forms of AI production. It will also host a workshop to consider how researchers can, and should, endeavour to centre these aspects of AI, through participatory methods, critical pedagogy, and worker-led inquiry.
The event will be held over two days at Queen Mary University of London in May 2025.
Invited participants:
Prof. Kate Crawford, USC Annenberg, author of Atlas of AI
Dr James Muldoon, University of Essex, co-author of Feeding the Machine
Dr Ana Valdivia, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Dr Milagros Miceli and Data Workers Inquiry, DAIR Institute
Schedule
28 May - Graduate Centre 201 and Peston Lecture Theatre
2.00-3.30pm - Opening panel: ‘On the Materialities of AI’, Ana Valdivia & James Muldoon (GC201)
Break - Tea, coffee, refreshments
4.00-5.00pm - Keynote talk, Kate Crawford (Peston LT)
5.00pm - Drinks reception (Graduate Centre Foyer)
29 May - Graduate Centre 201
2.00-3.00pm - Community-based research with data workers: Data Workers Inquiry project, Milagros Miceli
Break - Tea, coffee, refreshments
3.30-5.00pm - Workshop, political and methodological challenges of studying data work
Further details on the programme to be provided soon.