Daily radar
Daily radar
A curated selection of readings and debates at the intersection of artificial intelligence and anthropology.
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Who Gets Paid When Kiswahili Becomes Data
DataHive Africa is testing a linguistic infrastructure in Tanzania based on paid contributions, community review and consent. The project reveals who speaks, who validates and how value is distributed when everyday language enters artificial intelligence.
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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.
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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.
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Three Places from Which Artificial Intelligence Is Being Contested
Three cases show how artificial intelligence redistributes labour, knowledge and power across South Asia, Africa and Latin America.
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The radio speaks, the needle remembers and the cloud extracts
Namibia and the Colombian Amazon show that protecting a language or healing a territory also requires decisions about what may become data, what should remain outside the machine and which materials sustain artificial intelligence.
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What does not fit the mould
Fungi, algorithmic assessment, living heritage and AI ethics in a radar on the costs of making social life governable.
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Kiswahili Language and Global Infrastructures of Translation
Social and cultural anthropology radar on Kiswahili, African language models, AI, memory, heritage and global classification.
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AI Is Decided at the Border, in Training and Through Contracts
Access to models, scientific training and public procurement show how artificial intelligence is becoming state infrastructure.
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Who gets to name, earn and pass things on
From Indigenous consultation in Mexico to cultural royalties in Rwanda and Tamu language training in Nepal, three developments show that culture needs authority and means to stay alive.
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Releasing the Weights Is Not Enough
A model can be downloadable and still remain tied to a border, a cloud or a network. Access to AI depends on weights, permissions and material capacity.
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The science a platform can read
The documents published by Genesis Mission show that its wager is not merely technical. It redefines what counts as scientific productivity, credit and talent.
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Who can claim, who can count, who is left out
Three scenes for considering how artificial intelligence and data reorganise access to justice, the value of science and representation in health.
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The Machine Sees the Temple. Who Decides What It Means?
ChinaHeritaQA shows that recognising an image is not enough to understand heritage. It also asks who decides which forms of knowledge, categories and narratives count as cultural understanding.
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A university that made room: social and cultural anthropology at UPV/EHU
A tribute to anthropology at UPV/EHU: gender, bodies, language, art and memory for thinking about artificial intelligence.
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Ensamblajes Is Not a Waiting Room
Volume 3(1) of Ensamblajes shows why predoctoral research is not a waiting room: music, bodies, the city, myth and death read as situated accounts of social borders.
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Repair, catalogue, sustain: who keeps custody of memory
From heritage as an object of repair to data catalogued with AI and culture as social infrastructure after crisis: three planes of a single anthropological question about who keeps custody of memory, traced from Africa and Asia.
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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.
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Taking part is not the same as being seen: from territory to data, who reshapes the rules
From Bonn to Busan, Indigenous and community participation enters climate and heritage institutions that are now shaped by data, platforms and AI systems.
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The frontier is negotiated at Évian
The suspension of Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the G7 summit and the responses from China, Europe and the Global South show that frontier AI is governed through jurisdiction, data, infrastructure and alliances.
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Translating worlds: climate, heritage and artificial intelligence
Three recent processes show how anthropology helps us read who translates territories, heritages and memories into indicators, archives and AI systems.
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Healthcare AI also has a body
A radar on planetary health, medical AI, embodied suffering and structural inequality.
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AI does not understand worlds, the forest is not a resource and heritage does not fit inside a file
Three recent scenes show how AI systems, extractive policies and international heritage frameworks translate living cultures into their own languages.
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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.
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Recognition is not enough: algorithms, territories and disinformation
An anthropological reading of recognition, algorithms, territory and disinformation from Colón, the Brazilian Amazon and Indonesia.
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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.
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India under heat: counting, circulating, sowing
An anthropological reading of India through extreme heat, caste census, state data, social circulation and seeds.
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Three compasses for domesticating AI
Apple, Google and Microsoft did not merely present technology. They staged three distinct ways of making artificial intelligence acceptable.
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When anthropology enters the AI design room
From chatbot design at MIT to post-AI pedagogies at St Andrews, anthropology is beginning to intervene not only in how AI is studied, but in how it is designed, taught and inhabited.
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The kinship that is sung
Indio Solari, the ricotero mass and a popular form of kinning through music, technology and shared memory.
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Arturo Escobar and the politics of the pluriverse
From post-development to terricide, an anthropology for thinking worlds in dispute.
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Marisol de la Cadena and the worlds that do not fit
Indigenous futures, languages at risk and patrimonialised bodies in the June issue of American Anthropologist, the most complete count to date of human remains in British institutions, and Marisol de la Cadena's election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: what anthropology does with what the dominant frameworks cannot handle, and what that says about an AI that classifies, translates and normalises.
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Darío Gil and AI as state infrastructure
The Department of Energy's Genesis Mission situates AI as a state infrastructure of science, energy and security, while Descola, Viveiros de Castro and Veena Das offer anthropological keys for reading what world it produces.
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Spanish anthropology for reading infrastructures, platforms and everyday life
AIthropology Lab radar on Susana Narotzky, moral economy, food delivery, neighbourhoods, networks and commons, from social and cultural anthropology in Spain.
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Haraway and the case for a slow AI
AIthropology Lab radar on slow AI, funding for the discipline, restitution, more-than-human ecologies and ethnographic repair.
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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.
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Praxis, care and essential work
AIthropology Lab radar on public anthropology, global health, care work, multimodal pedagogy and kinship.