Pluralising Technology: Arturo Escobar on Artificial Intelligence

Between February and October 2026, Arturo Escobar has brought artificial intelligence into a question that has run through his work for three decades: who defines progress, through which forms of knowledge, and at the expense of which worlds? His most recent intervention was the lecture ‘The Revolution of Care as a Response to Artificial Intelligence’, at which the University of Cuenca paid tribute to him on 21 October.

From Cali to Cuenca

On 28 February, in Cali, Escobar opened the first module of the Ecosomatic School at Lugar a Dudas. The organisation published the script for the session, ‘Rehacer nuestro hacer. Las artes de codiseñar el mundo’ (‘Remaking What We Do: The Arts of Co-designing the World’), which includes one of the starkest formulations in his recent work: ‘Today, the principal anti-relational force is AI’ (Escobar, 2026a; our translation). In April, Bloomsbury Academic published Incomputable Earth as an open-access volume. Edited by Antonia Majaca, it includes a chapter by Escobar, Michal Osterweil and Kriti Sharma on reorienting technology; the book was presented at e-flux in Brooklyn on 20 October (Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma, 2026; e-flux, 2026). On 1 July, AI had already occupied a central place in his contribution to the online conversation ‘Sentipensar las transiciones’ (‘Feeling and Thinking about Transitions’), organised by the Jorge Alonso Chair and CLACSO’s Bodies, Territories and Resistances working group, and moderated by Xochitl Leyva Solano (Escobar, 2026b). September brought the invited lecture ‘The Revolution of Care: A Response to the AI Revolution’ at the University of Helsinki on the 23rd, during a seminar chaired by Florencia Quesada Avendaño and Anja Nygren (University of Helsinki, 2026), as well as a contribution to the Great Transition Campaign forum ‘Toward an Ecocivilization’ (Escobar, 2026c).

In Cuenca, the lecture formed part of the annual gathering of the Pacto Ecosocial e Intercultural del Sur, a Latin American network of intellectuals, social movements and researchers of which Escobar is a member. It was followed by tributes from the municipality, the Cabildo Popular por el Agua and the university. A panel featuring Maristella Svampa, Edgardo Lander, Miriam Lang and Gabriela Cabaña had been announced for the previous day, addressing geopolitics, artificial intelligence, data capitalism and the energy transition (El Mercurio, 2026). In his own lecture, Escobar introduced his analysis as ‘a provisional, contestable hypothesis’ about a moment dominated by artificial intelligence and the constellation of power driving it (Escobar, 2026d, 7:04; our translation).

Progress as a problem

In 1994, Escobar published ‘Welcome to Cyberia’ in Current Anthropology, one of the earliest programmes for an anthropology of cyberculture (Escobar, 1994). A year later, Encountering Development examined development as a discourse that turned much of the Global South into an object of intervention (Escobar, 1995). In this reading, progress operates as a politics of time: it classifies some trajectories as advanced and others as backward, turning one particular way of producing, knowing and inhabiting the world into a universal horizon for humanity.

The Cuenca lecture reconstructed this genealogy through the history of technology. Escobar located the ‘mechanistic paradigm of progress’ behind AI (Escobar, 2026d, 29:12; our translation). He recalled how world exhibitions, from the Crystal Palace in 1851 to the human zoos at St Louis in 1904, ranked peoples according to their technological development, and cited Michael Adas’s study of the ways colonialism made machines a measure of societies (Adas, 1989). The vocabulary used to describe artificial intelligence today reactivates this politics of time. We hear of races, acceleration, leadership and the danger of being left behind, as though one particular technological trajectory were the only possible direction.

The chapter in Incomputable Earth begins with the same diagnosis. Its prelude describes a present in which AI and other cutting-edge technologies increasingly reduce life to calculation beneath a thick veneer of unquestionable progress (Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma, 2026, p. 128). Later, it draws on Bayo Akomolafe’s phrase, ‘The way isn’t forward, it’s awkward’, to challenge patriarchal narratives of linear progress, perpetual growth and prediction (p. 143). In Cuenca, Escobar put the argument more directly. He characterised AI as an expression of an ‘instrumentalising and calculating’ ontology, close to what Heidegger called technological enframing, generating ‘narratives of infinite progress, of infinite abundance’; he compared its promise with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (Escobar, 2026d, 1:02:24; our translation). At CLACSO, he had connected AI to an instrumental and calculating ontology and to modern narratives of limitless growth and consumption, according to the published account of the event (Plascencia Barrera, 2026).

In the Cali script, this critique is grounded in a particular territory. Escobar writes that, in the geographical valley of the River Cauca, transformed over the past century by the sugar industry, terricide and progress coincide. The concept of terricide is a collective development of the Movement of Indigenous Women and Diversities for Buen Vivir, advanced by its founder, the Mapuche thinker Moira Millán (Millán, 2024). It names the killing of tangible ecosystems, the spiritual ecosystem, peoples and all forms of life, as expressed in the declaration reproduced in Incomputable Earth and presented by Escobar in Cuenca (Escobar, 2026d, 21:36). His question for AI takes the form of this territorial conflict: what counts as progress, from whose position is it measured, and who bears its costs?

Artificial intelligence as the culmination of separation

Escobar speaks of AI in the singular, referring to a sociotechnical complex of algorithms, infrastructures, capital and imaginaries of automation; when discussing algorithmic rationality, his primary reference is the major corporate platforms. With that distinction in mind, one heading in the Cali script presents AI as the culmination of the ontology of separation: a historically constructed way of organising reality around divisions between nature and culture, body and mind, individual and community, humanity and the rest of the living world. These dualisms take material form in institutions, economies, infrastructures and artefacts, making it possible to treat territory as a resource and knowledge as information detachable from the conditions in which it is produced.

The script describes AI as the outcome of an interwoven set of worldviews, narratives, infrastructures, designs and practices developed over five centuries. This periodisation places contemporary technology within the long history of colonial expansion, in keeping with the modernity/coloniality programme to which Escobar contributed alongside Aníbal Quijano, María Lugones and Edgardo Lander (Quijano, 2000; Lugones, 2008). In Cuenca, Escobar read a passage from Lander arguing that the commonsense assumptions of hegemonic groups within the world-system, with their colonial characterisation of reality, become the ground on which AI programmes construct their answers (Escobar, 2026d, 31:20). The Cali script also draws on Yanis Varoufakis’s thesis of technofeudalism, in which algorithmic rationality would be a central pillar (Varoufakis, 2023).

The political-economic diagnosis is borrowed. Escobar’s distinctive contribution is to add an ontological dimension drawn from his work on design (Escobar, 2016, 2018). If designing tools also means designing ways of being, an AI infrastructure establishes categories, decides which aspects of life should be turned into data, makes some relationships visible and others irrelevant, and redistributes authority between forms of knowledge. In the reading offered here, AI therefore helps produce the very world in which it subsequently appears merely to operate.

Alignment, power and care

In Cuenca, Escobar entered the technical debate through the problem of alignment: whether AI systems can be brought into line with human values. His answer was sceptical. Such systems have values already shaped by an ontology of instrumentalisation and ‘the compulsive optimisation of productivity’ (Escobar, 2026d, 49:47; our translation), which he describes as an ontology of neglect. He drew on the phenomenological tradition in the philosophy of technology, from John Haugeland’s familiar observation that computers do not care (Haugeland, 1979) to the critique developed by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores (1986), with whom the chapter in Incomputable Earth places Escobar in a small working group, and to the work of Francisco Varela. Care requires a feeling body; without embodiment, machines may participate in practices of care without themselves caring.

The technical problem belongs to what he described as a field of forces: the Dark Enlightenment, for which the problem is ‘democracy itself’ (Escobar, 2026d, 32:56; our translation); the various accelerationisms; an AI military-industrial complex exemplified by Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp; and far-right governments. This constellation is anchored in actual places, for ‘the cloud is a territory too’ (Escobar, 2026d, 36:18; our translation). In his contribution to the Great Transition Campaign, Escobar credits left accelerationism with asking whether AI could cease to function as a means of production optimised for profit, before concluding that ‘AI technologies carry the uncaring treatment of Earth to its ultimate conclusions’ (Escobar, 2026c).

This critique also raises a question of governance: who has the authority to design AI systems, and by what criteria can their effects be controlled? Yet the critical position remains open to other possibilities. The chapter in Incomputable Earth acknowledges the role of science and technology in transitions and mentions forms of collective intelligence made possible by digital technologies, a double position that recalls Ivan Illich’s convivial tools (1973).

Pluriversalising the future

In dialogue with Yuk Hui’s criticism of a single technological trajectory for the planet, the chapter calls monotechnologism the universalising claim of a technical logic organised around calculation, control and extraction. Its authors describe a cyber-economy governed by what Safiya Umoja Noble called algorithms of oppression (Noble, 2018). They locate the roots of monotechnologism in Sylvia Wynter’s account of monohumanism (Wynter, 2003), and in patriarchy as the foundation of what Rita Segato calls the historical project of things, opposed to the historical project of bonds (Segato, 2018). The same volume includes work by Yuk Hui, whose idea of technodiversity defends a plurality of cosmotechnics (Hui, 2020); Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, who have documented the material and labour chains of AI systems (Crawford and Joler, 2018; Crawford, 2021); and Katherine McKittrick, an important reader of Wynter (e-flux, 2026).

The response is condensed in the pluriversalisation of technology. The pluriverse denotes the coexistence of distinct ways of making reality, establishing relationships and organising life. Its technological expression requires more than diversity within a single system. A platform might include more languages and cultures without changing who controls its models, what counts as data or which objectives are optimised. To pluriversalise means enabling different collectives to define the purposes, criteria, forms of ownership and material conditions of the technologies that affect their lives. At CLACSO, Escobar presented this task to younger generations as making AI serve the construction of many worlds, beyond those imagined by the tech billionaires of major corporations (Escobar, 2026b). The chapter sets out eighteen propositions, adapted from earlier work on pluriversal design by Escobar and Marisol de la Cadena (de la Cadena and Escobar, 2023). These include technologies that repair the fabric of relationships between bodies, places and landscapes; restoring the collective and autonomous capacity to sustain life; and an ethics of AI that favours the digital commons (Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma, 2026, pp. 144–146).

The revolution of care provides a criterion for this pluralisation. Its foundation is the relational principle developed in Relationality as a politics of life (Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma, 2024), which the Great Transition forum summarises in the claim that everything inter-exists. In Cuenca, Escobar drew on strikingly different voices: the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, for whom how we live makes the world (Simpson, 2025); Leonardo Boff, who understands care as an essential way of being; and Humberto Maturana and Gerda Verden-Zöller’s biology of love, which places cooperation at the foundations of human life rather than evolutionary narratives centred on competition and aggression (Maturana and Verden-Zöller, 1993). If life is constitutively relational, evaluating a technology means asking which relationships it sustains. A highly efficient tool can erode a community’s autonomy in ways that a more modest tool, judged by the standards of productivity, might instead strengthen.

Open questions

The proposal leaves several questions that anthropology is well placed to explore. The first concerns the scope of the category itself. In Cuenca, Escobar grouped microprocessors, large language models, machine learning and lethal robots under one heading. This grouping supports his civilisational critique, but makes it harder to locate the separation he denounces: is it inherent in computational procedures, in ownership, in extractive infrastructures or in institutional uses? It also leaves less room for community-based tools, such as an application for translating an Indigenous language. Ethnographic work by Lucy Suchman (2007) and Nick Seaver (2017) shows how these effects depend on situated practices.

The second question concerns institutional translation. The problem of who controls those who regulate points to a gap without resolving it. The eighteen propositions establish principles but do not specify who owns computing capacity, how data are governed, which jurisdiction applies to a transnational system, or what happens when two projects claim the same territory, water or energy. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance offer an important example of translating relational concerns into practical guidance (Carroll et al., 2020). Their four components — Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility and Ethics — provide concrete criteria for bringing relationality into Indigenous data governance, although their effectiveness depends on the institutions and mechanisms through which they are implemented.

The third question is infrastructural. The autonomy Escobar advocates is territorially grounded, whereas semiconductors, data centres and foundation models depend on translocal networks of capital, energy, minerals and water. Maristella Svampa’s work on the commodity consensus (Svampa, 2013) and Miriam Lang’s research on green colonialism (Lang, Manahan and Bringel, 2024) offer ways to think through this mediation, a connection already present in the Cuenca programme.

The fourth question comes from approaches that challenge the framework from outside it. Shakir Mohamed, Marie-Therese Png and William Isaac propose decolonial theory as sociotechnical foresight, seeking to redirect AI research from within its own communities of practice (Mohamed, Png and Isaac, 2020). This effort to transform the discipline from within sits uneasily alongside Escobar’s ontological distance. Matteo Pasquinelli, who also contributes to Incomputable Earth, argues from a materialist standpoint that the history of AI is the history of the automation of the division of labour (Pasquinelli, 2023). Escobar’s account does not exclude materiality: at CLACSO, he presented a framework linking ontologies, narratives, designs, infrastructures and practices, including AI infrastructures (Plascencia Barrera, 2026). The contrast with Pasquinelli is therefore not about whether material conditions matter, but about the explanatory priority given to relations of production and to ways of making reality.

Towards the end of his Cuenca lecture, Escobar recalled a statement that, according to his account, had been made by a mamo, a spiritual authority from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta: ‘The danger is a people without awareness holding great power in their hands’ (Escobar, 2026d, 1:05:22; our translation). His interventions come at a time when artificial intelligence is described through the vocabulary of races, acceleration and leadership. They make it possible to examine this language before accepting it as a neutral description, and to ask which relationships a technology sustains, which territories it consumes and whom it empowers to decide. The revolution of care remains a work in progress; for now, it offers a criterion through which to contest what it means to advance.

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