Topic
Work and automation
Readings on digital work, automation, care and the human infrastructures that sustain AI.
- Note
Pluralising Technology: Arturo Escobar on Artificial Intelligence
Between February and October 2026, Arturo Escobar has brought artificial intelligence into the question at the heart of his work: who defines progress, and at the expense of which worlds? A reading of his interventions in Cali, at CLACSO, in Helsinki and in Cuenca, alongside his recent writings on technology, care and the pluriverse.
- Radar
Caring for the Worlds That Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming
UNESCO promotes shared critical media literacy, Arturo Escobar places care at the heart of the debate on AI, and the IACHR warns about technologies transforming territories across Latin America.
- Note
Where Does the Sangha End? Ana Muñoz and the Boundaries of Care
Ana Muñoz reflects on Buddhism, feminism and coloniality. AIthropology Lab places her testimony in dialogue with ritual and the politics of dirt in Delhi.
- Radar
The contested social contract
Jean MARTIAL's proposal to distribute wealth generated by automation is examined alongside protests in Paris, New Delhi, Madrid and the United States, and inequalities in access to computing power across Latin America.
- Radar
What Delegation Leaves Behind
Clinical AI scribes examined in Birmingham, ten minutes with an assistant in the United States, 857 Chinese model releases and Africa's 0.6%. Delegating to AI leaves work to be done. Who does it?
- Note
Artificial Intelligence Takes Root in Latin American Social Sciences
COMECSO’s national conference on artificial intelligence and the social sciences points to a Latin American agenda that studies AI as a social fact, from power and inequality to work, gender and the classification of knowledge.
- Radar
Remembering, knowing, finding — when machines need to make the human legible
Three signals on conversational memory, expert work and cultural discoverability show how AI is turning human practices into computational infrastructure.
- Note
The self as a mine: Appadurai in Bielefeld
Arjun Appadurai calls the ‘mineable self’ a new commodity made of relationships, stories, profiles and data. A reading of his 2026 work on personhood, affect and artificial intelligence.
- Radar
Who retains the power to decide?
Harare, OpenAI and Lahore show that governing AI means deciding who controls data, which institutions retain power, and which forms of knowledge count before automation becomes inevitable.
- Radar
Relationships Come Before the Algorithm
Five frequencies from contemporary anthropology in the United States for thinking about the world we are beginning to automate.
- Essay
When the forest enters the model
Artificial intelligence can improve wildfire detection and response, but it cannot replace the climatic, territorial and social transformation required by an increasingly flammable Europe.
- Radar
Staying Is Also a Form of Movement
A language documented beyond its fluent speaker, a former prison turned into an archive, and communities remaining under climatic pressure show that staying is not the same as standing still. Permanence distributes labour, care, memory, authority, and possibilities for the future.
- Radar
Technology Comes Later
Three cases show that artificial intelligence does not begin with the model. Before it is trained, institutions and communities have already decided how a language is written, which abilities are recognised as work, and which practices can circulate as heritage.
- Essay
Digital violence is not a design flaw
From synthetic images created in a school to the automatic reuse of photographs on Instagram. An anthropological account of how platforms and institutions distribute harm and the work of repair.
- Radar
Kwe’sx uma kiwe îtxi
A Nasa Yuwe interpreter reveals the potential of natural language processing and raises a decisive question about who governs the data when an Indigenous language enters artificial intelligence.
- Radar
Learning in the public university: five anthropological questions for reading AI from the Complutense
A first-person word of thanks to the teachers of the UCM and a defence of the public university as a space of knowledge, work, equality and debate for thinking about artificial intelligence.
- Note
The gesture as data
From Meta to Gurugram, how clicks, skills and bodily techniques are turned into data to train automation.
- Radar
Languages, borders and forests. Who has the right to belong
Three scenes connected by a single anthropological question. Who can name, inhabit and care for a territory.
- Radar
China and those who feed AI
Three researchers help us understand Chinese artificial intelligence from the street, the factory and the global infrastructure of data.
- Radar
AI is no longer a tool. It is a social infrastructure
AIthropology Lab radar on regulation, work, education, cultural heritage, the anthropology of AI and material infrastructure.
- Radar
Praxis, care and essential work
AIthropology Lab radar on public anthropology, global health, care work, multimodal pedagogy and kinship.