Global Dialogues

​The screen on which you're reading these words contains tin. That's how Riar Rizaldi explains his artwork, where Natasha, a solar-powered AI, traces her material ancestry. ​A third of the world's tin comes from Bangka Island, Indonesia, where indigenous miners and state-owned industries respond to increasing global demand with accelerated extraction. While tin seems critical for technology's future, the supply isn't endless.

In this essay, I will address the question of technological utopianism through the lens of energy politics, which I believe is fundamentally connected to how we imagine our technological future. As I learned in my Critical Energy Studies class, the history of petroleum offers a powerful metaphor for understanding our current AI moment.​

The concept of "petro-amnesia," introduced by Rob Nixon, illustrates how societies forget the precariousness of progress dependent on finite resources. His analysis of "cities of salt" built on "delusory wealth" exposes the temporal shortsightedness inherent in technological utopianism. Petroleum once promised endless prosperity while concealing its environmental and political consequences. Similarly, today's AI utopias promote visions of abundance while obscuring their material dependencies.​

This pattern reveals a contradiction: as technologies promise liberation, they can enforce new forms of control. When revolutionary technologies concentrate power rather than democratizing it, they reproduce existing hierarchies in new forms. Without robust democratic oversight, AI systems will likely amplify social inequalities rather than resolve them. The promised liberation becomes another form of dependency.

What makes technological utopias particularly seductive is their targeted distribution of benefits and burdens. Nixon describes "resource imperialism inflicted on the global South" maintaining "unsustainable consumer appetites" elsewhere. This spatial disconnect between technological benefits and costs reveals AI's hidden material foundations which constitute the necessary but unacknowledged conditions of "clean" digital futures.

I argue that the Promethean dream of mastery over nature through technology misunderstands both human capability and earthly limits. Scientific knowledge has enabled unprecedented power without corresponding wisdom about its application. As technologies become more powerful, this wisdom gap grows increasingly dangerous. AI systems that exceed human comprehension while affecting global systems present unprecedented ethical challenges.

Haraway's philosophy offers an alternative to technological transcendence: "staying with the trouble" by cultivating response-ability toward complex entanglements. This approach rejects both utopian solutionism and fatalistic resignation, instead embracing the creative potential of constraint. Rather than seeking to overcome earthly limitations, wisdom recognizes that meaningful technological development must work within ecological boundaries.

Acknowledging vulnerability leads to more responsible technology governance. This stance is relevant as technological capabilities often advance faster than ethical frameworks. The accelerating development of AI amplifies this concern, as increasingly autonomous technologies may outpace human oversight.The wisdom in acknowledging precarity doesn't lie in abandoning technological development, instead it lies in recognizing its embeddedness in earthly systems. The petroleum era demonstrated that technological revolutions ignoring material constraints ultimately undermine themselves. With AI, we face a similar choice: between unlimited power and a more humble recognition of our dependence on fragile ecological and social systems.

Amira Zhanat (SFS'27) is a junior in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University In Qatar.