In this project, we explore some of the logic, processes, and tools that those in power will use to support decision-making in large-scale technopolitical climate projects like geoengineering—the (re)engineering of the global climate. We collaborated with two typical decision support tools to create this work—artificial intelligence (AI) and maps–both of which are historically tools of privilege and power.

AI (machine learning in this case) is a tool embedded with an obscured but present logic—biased by the vast data from which it learns, and inputs it receives. We fed our AI tool ethical concepts, contradictions, and images of landscapes. It generated images of a world it “believes” best represent our seemingly incomprehensible inputs. In this sense, the AI tool offers its perspective on our ethical prompts related to geoengineering. We then “mapped” the AI’s perspective.

A map is also a tool embedded with a particular bias and perspective with the power to both change our view of the world and influence our decisions about it. For example, the most common map which was made in the 16th century by a white European explorer, disproportionally enlarges the western hemisphere, thus conveying a sense of importance and power to this region. A map, even if it is presented as an objective representation, actually alters reality.

There is a transparent and yet influential dynamic between the perspectives offered by and power of certain tools in general, and those of the people who wield them.

Within such technopolitical contexts as geoengineering, how might decision makers encounter and react to the biases embedded in their tools, when some biases will threaten to undermine existing power structures, others to amplify them?

Calibrating Stretched Transparency was generously supported through the Scotiabank Fund for AI and Society at the University of Ottawa AI + Society Initiative, the Faculties of Engineering and Arts (uOttawa), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.