Description

Amidst intensifying debates about the possibilities and harms with AI and automated-decision making, their scale of operations and energy requirements are also soaring. Questions that are gaining traction as public concerns about the environmental toll of these systems are rising are for example: how many watts of energy does an AI consume and how large is the carbon footprint of an AI? Julia Velkova will discuss the importance of shifting the perspective on digital “sustainabilities” and the questions that we ask about them; from quantity to process, and from counting emissions to understanding the manifold frictions that undergird the entanglements between digital and energy industries as they attempt to imagine joint sustainable futures. Drawing on a range of examples from Sweden and nearly a decade of research on data infrastructure, Julia discusses the transformation of power relations, societal inequalities, breakages and infrastructural instabilities and frictions that emerge in the space between digital and energy industries in transition. Rather than sustainable futures, it is time to talk about how to make liveable relations with digital technologies.

Julia Velkova is associate professor of media and communication studies at the Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, and a Profutura Scientia fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her work explores the intersection of digital infrastructure and energy politics, and the end of life of large-scale communication networks. She is co-editor of Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical relations (with Lisa Parks and Sander De Ridder, 2023) and founder and co-director of the DataLab at Linköping University.