Abstract
This chapter focuses on how Automated Decision-Making (ADM) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are being imagined by stakeholders in the energy industry and policy, as part of a new emerging and future infrastructure. We discuss how people and resources are framed in these discourses, and question the extent to which these framings create plausible future visions. Drawing on ethnographic examples, we demonstrate how everyday life in the present and its future imaginaries complicate the scenarios these discourses imply. In doing so, through this example, we outline how emerging technologies, and the automated systems they are associated with, are embedded in imaginaries of future infrastructures, why they might be flawed and why we have an ethical responsibility to engage in the debates surrounding them.
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Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects funding Scheme (Digital Energy Futures project number LP180100203) in partnership with Monash University, Ausgrid, AusNet Services and Energy Consumers Australia. We thank all the participants who generously gave their time to be part of our research.
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Pink, S., Dahlgren, K., Strengers, Y., Nicholls, L. (2022). Anticipatory Infrastructures, Emerging Technologies and Visions of Energy Futures. In: Valkonen, J., Kinnunen, V., Huilaja, H., Loikkanen, T. (eds) Infrastructural Being. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15827-8_3
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