Cultivating Artificial Intelligence (AI) Connections Through Soil and Nature: Data/Writing/Future

Paper Abstract: Increasingly AI is used in the agricultural sector across Asia and Africa to assist farmers making the “right” decision with respect to crop planning, soil management and weather predictions. Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in India, this paper seeks to draw linkages with similar developments in African countries – Nigeria in particular – to theorize on how AI is “imagined” to benefit farmers and add to their resilience. For this it will draw upon Indian speculative fiction and African Futurology to theorize on collective futures in relation to anthropocenic concerns. In doing so it asks the pertinent question how data, algorithms and related technologies are envisioned vis-a-vis local knowledge of farming as it has provided families with a livelihood across generations. As AI is increasingly rolled out by large multinationals across vastly different rural contexts how is the “soil” itself imagined to speak across borders? Thinking through imaginative worlds as proposed by speculative fiction writers from the Global South is particularly helpful in understanding underlying visions and ambitions that instead of the soil are generally more deeply rooted in global capital and neoliberalism. The paper proposes to envision those involved in developing AI-powered tools for agricultural as characters in a story whose narrations of its potential use for farming, and superiority over “traditional” tools, helps shed light on understanding the contextual conditions that makes their roll-out possible. In linking disjoint and remote pockets of soil through datafied/reified realities, how do those working with AI imagine its future?