Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper provides empirical findings from a study on autonomous drone delivery in Australia. It uses the frame of the "testbed" to understand how and why Australia is used as a testing ground for AI systems, connecting these trials with the history of science and technology testing in the colony

Paper long abstract

Keywords: AI nationalism, testbeds, Australia, drone delivery, race

This paper examines the phenomenon of the AI testbed and practices of testing-in-the-wild. It combines historical and sociological approaches to understand how the settler-colony of Australia has come to be treated as an ideal test site, using commercial drone delivery company Wing Aviation as a case study. It connects the figuration of Australia as contemporary testbed with histories of the nation as a colonial experiment. I argue that this historical frame has been consistently deployed to justify the treatment of lands and peoples as experimental subjects across a range of domains—from medical science, penal management, and military operations. In doing so, I show how Australia has been treated as a test site and Australians as test subjects based on changing imaginaries of the nation and its people—from proxies for whiteness and Empire in the colonial period, to multiculturalism and ethnic diversity in the contemporary era.