Artificial intelligence in the new forms of environmental governance in the Chilean State: Towards an eco-algorithmic governance

Abstract

One of the most popular fields of experimentation with technological solutions based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and algorithmic systems is environmental studies, particularly as it relates to climate change. The promise of mitigating the impact of human activity on the environment through the introduction of sensor technologies has given way to a series of narratives around their role and capabilities. Focusing on the case of Environmental Intelligence, an initiative developed by the Chilean government's Superintendency for the Environment that incorporates AI into the monitoring process, we offer arguments regarding the articulation of an eco-algorithmic governmentality in which the environment is desingularized and reduced to a series of metrics associated with regulatory compliance. The operations that serve to prototype and give shape to the initiative created a series of tensions around the possibility of arriving at other forms of involvement in and understanding of the environment. This article shows how this eco-algorithmic governmentality conceptualizes the environment as an entity that can be optimized and rationalized, generating epistemic frictions with other logics of relationality and situated and terrestrial sensibility.