Depending on your perspective, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is either going to save the world or destroy it. In this talk, Akhil Gupta looks at the promise and perils of using AI in the arena of climate change through an analysis of the energy and infrastructural sectors. AI can help mitigate climate change in different ways but also enables the main actors of the carbon economy, including the tech companies, to promote misconceptions about climate change for their own benefit. AI »solutions« to the climate crisis are ultimately dependent on the Categories in which data is collected for algorithmic operations. What are the implications for AI of the anthropological truism that different cultures and societies classify the world in different ways? How would a postcolonial and decolonial AI challenge the basic presuppositions on which solutions to the climate crisis are being thought?

Akhil Gupta is an Indian-American anthropologist whose research focuses on the anthropology of the state, development, as well as on postcolonialism. He is currently a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In cooperation with the Institute for Social Anthropology / ÖAW and the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology / University of Vienna.