Send message to Author

Short abstract:

This paper examines how Al policy and AI platforms focused on smart farming in Western Cape simultaneously pixelate plant beings and convert gendered bodies into binary forms of expression, thus limiting AI futures in South Africa.

Long abstract:

Drawing upon feminist STS, critical plant studies, and STS in/of Africa, this paper examines how Al policy and platforms focused on smart farming in the Western Cape simultaneously pixelate plant beings and convert gendered bodies into binary forms of expression, which are more easily “readable” by the logics of computers and the law, but in turn, limit futures of care for plant environments and peoples of all racialized genders. Based upon ethnographic research, Agri-tech companies in the Western Cape are developing AI technologies to help farmers maximize profits through crop monitoring, which ideally reduces reliance on fertilizers and water but, in doing so, converts apples into pixelated dark blue squares of overperforming versus light blue squares of underperforming fruit, thus reinforcing understandings of plants as mere resources for extraction. At the same time, the 2020 South African Report of the Presidential Commission on the Fourth Industrial Revolution seeks to challenge global flows of knowledge production of West to the rest by positioning South Africa as a site of innovation for AI-based technologies, but it does so through an emphasis on social wellbeing as “economic competitiveness” and an attention to gender that reduces gendered relations to a computational binary logic of sex ratios and male/female, which limits transformations for AI across the continent that enables social justice. Concluding, this paper contends that a robust vision of the governing of South African AI futures must exceed the economic, and attend to relations of intersectional gender and multi-species justice.