Planetary Intelligence

Halpern, Orit

Today in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we assume that artificially intelligent tracking systems will guide public health, new social media and video conferencing technologies will support our economy and personal lives, and automated logistical systems will provide goods and services. This phenomena where the continuation of life is imagined as contingent on the on-going penetration of computation into the environment marks a new form of governmentality. This article is a speculative genealogy of how this new condition, that I label the “smartness mandate”, emerged. Using a series of case studies, the event horizon telescope, the lithium fields of the Atacama desert, and new centers for applied mathematics, I trace a historical reformulation of histories of extraction, knowledge production and energy to begin outlining how we have come to believe in ubiquitous computing and Artificial Intelligence are central to human survival.