편집자의 글

책 속에서

As uncritical techno-optimism and the worship of technology intensify, the introduction and application of emerging technologies come to be exalted as if they were breaking away from outdated practices and generating new social values. Technological absolutism is regarded as the righteous path to social innovation, becoming the dominant sentiment of our time. Yet, as reiterated, this perspective carries the peril of instrumental rationality—treating technology itself as the sole and direct substance of social transformation.

“AI Media Ecology” arises from the author’s critical awareness and desire to restore media technologies—now elevated to objects of worship or faith—back to their rightful place. Humanity has built civilization through its unique capacity to invent technology, a faculty distinctive to our species. Yet it is equally true that the very advancement of such high-level technologies has contributed to bringing our contemporary planetary condition into the crisis of the Anthropocene.

In this era where technology has become a new religion amid the reality of the Anthropocene crisis, this book examines what the status and direction of AI technology ought to be. Finding a path toward collective flourishing through transforming and rethinking today’s advanced media technologies is by no means an easy task. However, in the face of climate catastrophe, human technology, too, must learn humility.

Thus, I turn my attention to an ecological approach and solution to AI technology—an approach grounded in ecologism, which above all emphasizes the need to reimagine our relationships of peaceful entanglement with all forms of life and more-than-human beings.

For those of us accustomed to novelty, speed, acceleration, growth, competition, and progress, the sensibilities of slowness, deceleration, degrowth, coexistence, and care often feel unfamiliar. Yet the crisis of the Anthropocene reminds us that unless we adopt an awareness of ecological entanglement and a relational sensibility as a way of life, survival on this planet called Earth will be difficult. In particular, cultivating a sense of coexistence mediated by technology is closely tied to becoming attuned to the ethos of deceleration.

The practice of deceleration must begin by exposing the material conditions and infrastructural realities of contemporary artificial intelligence—technologies that often masquerade as immaterial, clean innovations. From the perspective of the climate crisis, it is crucial to draw attention to the waste heat generated by the excessive energy consumption and carbon emissions involved in the computational processes of generative AI.

In addition, we must confront the ecological ruptures that remain largely invisible to us: the environmental destruction and degradation caused by indiscriminate extractivism in rare metal (rare earth) mining; the exploitation of laborers in the Global South mobilized for extraction and mining; the toxic refining processes that follow rare earth mineral mining; and the precarious labor conditions of those engaged in AI reinforcement learning. Revealing these concrete realities is essential to understanding the fractured ecology underlying artificial intelligence.

Our understanding of technology can no longer remain trapped in the binary of naïve optimism about a distant technological future and self-defeating fatalism. To weave contemporary technology into the ecological paradigm of the Anthropocene, we must first take a more grounded, reality-based approach—reconfiguring and rebalancing the relationships among the artificial and the natural, the living and the mechanical, the virtual and the real, the material and the immaterial that surround us.

Only through such recalibration can we begin to open a testing ground for ecological healing, addressing the pervasive technological toxicity that afflicts the planet. Ultimately, deceleration must serve as a vital means to regulate the frenzied pace of techno-capitalist acceleration and to bring the Anthropocene crisis to a halt.

차례