Description
This paper analyses discourses on artificial intelligence (AI) as an Existential Risk, focusing on how they construct subject positions, and their political implications. It investigates how Existential Risk discourses mobilise the category of “intelligence” to present AI as a nonhuman subject that poses a risk to humanity, as well as to construe humanity as deserving of salvation and protection from risk. This paper argues that, by articulating “intelligence” within a framework marked by power relations based on coloniality, gender, race and anthropocentrism, Existential Risk discourses represent the persistence of the modern notion of the human. It proposes that the image of the human operates both in the “humanisation” of AI through the enactment of a connection between intelligence and power, as well as in the delimitation of the meanings of humanity – and which form of humanity is to be protected. Moreover, this paper argues that, as a consequence of this centrality of intelligence, Existential Risk discourses mobilise a teleological framework that presents the development of human intelligence towards (post)humanity as an ultimate moral value, justifying bio/necropolitical logics of governance that reproduce colonial, gendered, racialised and anthropocentric forms of domination.
