Geographies of responsibility, care and repair in digital worlds of AI: introduction to the Themed Intervention

The presence of AI in everyday life has dramatically increased and intensified in the last few years. From playing a role in teaching and research activities within educational institutions, to becoming a ubiquitous feature in search engines and in all manner of apps, AI is now omnipresent. While geographers have long examined the role of AI in various ways, in this Themed Intervention we highlight often overlooked dimensions of responsibility, care and repair in the mobilisation and impacts of AI. This Themed Intervention questions the genealogy of AI and its creators' duty of care towards the real-life impacts of its operationalisation, how AI might be (responsibly) governed to reduce these impacts and how responsibility is or should be devolved across different actors (e.g., individualistic or collective responsibilities). We acknowledge that despite its potential for positive ends, AI has already caused damage to people, societies, environments and therefore question whether repair (of the people–AI relation, of AI consequences) is possible, what form this can or should take as well as how the faults of AI can be corrected. By exploring care, the contributors share concern with caring for and of AI, including its current impacts and futures, with each contribution ruminating on how caring relations are configured. We argue that if we focus on dimensions of care and repair when critically evaluating the discursive and material realities of AI, issues relating to responsibility are impossible to ignore.