Artificial? Naturally! - Alec Bălășescu
This article invites the reader to follow seemingly unrelated paths towards the same goal: making sense of what it means to be human in a world that casually blends discourses on nature, technology, and biology having at their centre the ideas of progress, optimization, and their capitalization. Within this type of current thinking, the challenges posed by climate change could be addressed technologically, the dream of ecological capitalism could continue ad infinitum, and Artificial Intelligence would be instrumental in fulfilling this promise. A closer look at the politics of optimization within and outside managerial perspectives may teach us otherwise: one of the main sources of our repeated failures related to governance and climate change lies not intrinsically with the qualities of the tools we use, but in the underlying assumptions with which we design, and the purpose for which we use, them. Between the rock of technology and the hard place of nature, humanity needs to find a new way to relate with both in order to avoid being squashed. That is, we need to revise our implicit assumptions for building our tools, to critique the thinking about our relationships with them, and to re-assess their use in order to move away from the illusions of the possibility to mitigate climate change effects and the real danger of perpetuating the status-quo of capitalist extractivism under the guise of an ecological one.Read by actor Daniel Popa , with an illustration by Andrei Paceahttps://theanthro.art/artificial-naturally-alec-balasescu/