Meet the class behind the podcast

This podcast is represents the work of a graduate seminar at the University on Utah. In the fall of 2024 we gathered to learn about AI and the Environment. We began with nonfiction that informed us of the environmental promise and peril of AI then moved to science fiction that imagined alternative relationships between AI and the environment. These podcasts are the final projects of the students in the course.

ENGL 6810-001 Fall 2024 Special Topics

EHUM 6850-001 Fall 2024 Issues in Env Hum

Welcome to AI and the Environment in Science Fiction!

Artificial intelligence permeates every aspect of our lives, but our lives are not the limit of its reach. The applications of AI extend beyond the human to touch the lives of the plants and animals with whom we share the planet. While tech developers and popular journalism tend to view AI as either an environmental savior or an environmental destroyer, in this class we used fictional accounts of nonhuman intelligence to explore how the environmental crisis and the current deployment of AI are related in complex ways. Science fiction texts reveal, for example, how risky AI and environmental crisis are twinned, stemming from the same underlying economic model that prioritizes growth over thoughtful, considered development. Literary analysis also highlights how these two emergencies share a rhetorical problem in which harms are positioned as being a problem for the future, obscuring the damage occurring right now. Finally, science fiction models a helpful shift in focus away from how to build a less harmful tool toward the concepts and frameworks that underly technologies and determine what kinds of tools are even possible.

Participants:

Elizabeth Callaway (she/her), Lacey Bishop (she/her), Olivia Chandler (she/her), Marissa Greer (she/her), David James (he/they), Jerald Lim (he/they), Sydney Little (she/her), Quinn Luthy (they/them), Saxton Nelson (he/they), Amanda Pope (she/her), Mykie Valenzuela (they/them).

Theme Music: by David James

Readings: