Artificial Violence: The Anthropocene, Ecocide and Artificial Intelligence

Drawing on ideas from across the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, James Tyner considers how the advent of the Anthropocene and and the coming age of artificial intelligence challenges us to rethink our notions of violence. Humanity’s destruction of the Earth system, which has come to define the early decades of the twenty-first century, has transformed how violence is realised, and demands a reworking of the concept, one that no longer posits humans as separate from nature. Tyner shows that the existential crises that confront humanity in the Anthropocene have ruptured the comfortable belief of a collective afterlife and this understanding has, for many people, been the catalyst in the pursuit of artificial intelligence. If Homo sapiens can’t fix Earth’s problems, perhaps technology will. But while some digital technologies may help address environmental problems, their unrestrained use may also engender other, unanticipated, harm to the Earth system. The tremendous push toward the production and proliferation of computational systems that has accompanied the great acceleration of human interventions in the Earth system is not the non-violent solution it is trumpeted as, but a hidden form of ecocide – an artificial violence.