Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This analysis reconstructs a dominant AI narrative of automation and precision through which agricultural actors make sense of an uncertain future. By analyzing ambivalence unsettling this narrative, it reveals value conflicts and provokes deliberation on how the future could be otherwise.

Paper long abstract

Technological innovation in the agricultural sector is often heralded as the ultimate fix to grand challenges such as labor shortages and food security. In promissory narratives, AI systems are envisioned as being composed of sensors and robots, which inform decision-making and automate labor on farms. Such AI narratives leave little room for conceiving of alternatives because the future appears as pre-determined and inevitable. To highlight that it could come otherwise, research on the future of agriculture often foregrounds exceptional reflexive accounts of actors who tend to live on the fringes. In this presentation, however, we highlight that alterity exists within hegemonic discourse. Based on a case study on fruit growing in the Netherlands, we analyze interruptions within a promissory AI narrative of automation and precision, which pervades empirical material gathered in a student project, stakeholder interviews and field visits. By reading the empirical material against the grain, we recognize that those who tell this narrative experience ambivalence, which we consider as affective manifestations of value conflicts. To alleviate the unpleasant experience of ambivalence, alternative values are dismissed, for instance by depreciating feeling and judgement against scientific knowledge in agricultural labor, prioritizing economic profitability over environmental sustainability, and foregrounding innovation while backgrounding politics. We take such oft-overlooked subjectivity seriously by cultivating sensitivity for ambivalence within a seemingly coherent narrative. Ambivalence reveals that the future is not as fixed as it may appear and that there is room for ethical reflection on what sustainable agriculture and just labor conditions could look like.