Description
Emerging technologies have increasingly gained prominence driven by numerous anxieties about the anticipated possibilities of their influence on the political and public sphere . Focussing specifically on AI and drawing on existing critiques that focus on AI’s entanglements with technology corporations, we examine the temporal politics embedded in how AI is discursively constructed as nascent, unprecedented, and future-oriented. By interrogating the ubiquitous classification of AI as an “emerging” technology, we argue that this designation has significant political consequences for the growing influence of technology corporations that reiterate historical and contemporary power asymmetries. Our central provocation critiques the perpetually “emerging” understanding of AI through a decolonial feminist analytical framework that examines the temporal (who declares technological “newness” and what histories are erased) and epistemic (whose knowledge counts as innovation and whose labour remains invisible?) aspects of this discourse. Through a critical examination of statements by prominent Tech CEOs and their media circulation, we trace the ways in which “emergence” operates as temporal hierarchy that naturalizes and legitimates western, masculinised subjects while simultaneously obscuring the racialised and gendered exploitation, resource extraction, and epistemic violence that constitute AI systems.
