Date and time: Wednesday, 1 April 2026, 10:00-12:00
Speaker: Anne Pasek, Trent University
Title: AI Before the Ruins
Location: Teknikringen 74D, 5th floor, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment
Bio: Anne Pasek is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersections of climate communication, the environmental humanities, and science and technology studies. She studies how carbon becomes communicable in different communities and media forms, to different political and material effects.
She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University, as well as the Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture and the Environment.
This seminar with Anne Pasek will ask us to consider that when we look at the expansion of the AI industry what we may be witnessing are future ruins. Anne is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University.
The past two years have involved an unprecedented build out of energy-hungry data centres and GPUs to provide the necessary infrastructure for an ‘AI Race.’ With the support of an evolving alliance between large tech companies, far-right national governments, and fossil energy interests, this race has been defined by a rush to add as much data and compute as possible to the training of frontier transformer models, regardless of the climate cost. This has also resulted in a precarious economic bubble, with unprofitable products buoyed by irrational corporate enthusiasm and complex financing agreements predicated on classes of chips that may have operational lives as short as two years.
This talk will explore what might happen when the bubble pops, and what kinds of climate and infrastructural constraints AI hype might leave in its wake. Inspired by recent work thinking across political economy and political philosophy, the talk figures data centres as a class of asset that is particularly resistant to storing value or being recuperated by projects of salvage afterwards. Instead, and in conversation with the temporal shifts inspired by Anthropocene scholarship, data centres might be best approached as future ruins.
