Artificial Violence

Artificial Violence conceptually reconfigures our theoretical understanding and empirical documentation of violence at the interstices of two vibrant fields of study: the Anthropocene and artificial intelligence. The book shows how both these fields, which have come to define the early decades of the twenty-first century, have mediated practices of violence and transformed how violence is realised, requiring a reworkng of the concept.

Artificial Violence navigates an intellectual journey that straddles the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. It explores the relationship between the imaginary violence of artificial intelligence – especially in its robotic form – and the reality of existing (and future) systems of artificial intelligence. It offers an exploration of the latest iteration of how violence can be abstracted, a product of two dominant ontologies, and challenges us to consider whether we should recognize the suffering and loss that they realise as "violent" or as something else. If we are to provide a balanced, non-hyperbolic discussion of the promises and perils of AI and to fully comprehend the Anthropocene, and humanity’s current and future disruptions of the Earth system, we must understand more concretely artificial violence as it exists in both real and imagined ways.