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An­dreas Forst­ing

Ph.d. Fellow

Subjects
IT Artificial intelligence Discourse Sustainability

Primary research areas

AI and Sustain­ability
AI is ad­van­cing at an in­cred­ible pace, but so too is it the toll it takes on the en­vir­on­ment. I in­vest­ig­ate this con­nec­tion between tech­no­lo­gic­al pro­gress and sustain­ability.
Prob­lem­at­isa­tion and Prob­lem Rep­res­ent­a­tion
My ana­lyt­ic­al angle looks at how we as a so­ci­ety con­sider cer­tain things to be prob­lems, and how this prob­lem­at­isa­tion is in­formed by all the things we take for gran­ted. This angle is in­spired by the work of Car­ol Bac­chi and Michel Fou­cault.
In­form­a­tion In­fra­struc­ture and clas­si­fic­a­tion
Most things in so­ci­ety are put to­geth­er through vari­ous sys­tems of clas­si­fic­a­tion and stand­ard­isa­tion. These sys­tems are polit­ic­al and im­pact­ful, and re­quire crit­ic­al scru­tiny.

Sus­tain­able pro­gress is a choice for every­one to make

My interests in a nutshell 
The modern world is one built on the notions of perpetual growth, underpinned by technological progress. The most recent technology promising to continue this trend is Artificial Intelligence. However, while promising benefits across numerous areas of society, this progress comes at environmental and social costs. These costs are not just technologically, but also socially grounded. 

My research 
I explore how the environmental and social costs of AI are driven through social processes such as problematisation, from a critical theory perspective. My goal is to explore how technological progress is driven by social dynamics, and the ways in which these dynamics lead to more or less sustainable outcomes.