A Centre for Drones and Culture seminar talk (online)
Dr Thao Phan, School of Sociology, Australian National University
About the Talk
Testing-in-the-wild: innovation nationalism and the colonial dynamics of new technology testbeds
This presentation analyses the phenomenon of the AI testbed and practices of “testing-in-the-wild.” It combines historical and sociological approaches to understand how places like Australia have come to be treated as ideal test sites for new AI systems, using commercial drone delivery company Wing Aviation as a case study. It connects the figuration of Australia as contemporary testbed with histories of the nation as a colonial experiment. I argue that this historical frame has been consistently deployed to justify the treatment of lands and peoples as experimental subjects across a range of domains: techniques of penal management in the nineteenth century, military weapons in the early twentieth century, AI-driven systems like drone delivery in the twenty-first century. By connecting this history to the present moment, I show how Australia has been variously treated as a test site and Australians as test subjects based on changing imaginaries of the nation and its people, from proxies for whiteness and Empire in the colonial period, to multiculturalism and ethnic diversity in the contemporary era.
About the Speaker
Thao Phan is a feminist science and technology studies (STS) researcher who specialises in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture. She is a Lecturer in Sociology (STS) at the Research School for Social Sciences at the Australian National University (ANU). Her research examines the role of AI systems in constituting categories such as gender, race, class, and nation.
She has published on topics including whiteness and the aesthetics of AI, big-data-driven techniques of racial classification, and the commercial capture of AI ethics research. She is the co-editor of the volumes An Anthropogenic Table of Elements (University of Toronto Press) and Economies of Virtue: The Circulation of 'Ethics' in AI (Institute of Network Cultures), and her writing appears in journals such as Big Data & Society, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technosocience, Science as Culture, and Cultural Studies.
She is an editorial board member of the internatioal journal's Science, Technology & Human Values, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and International Journal of Cultural Studies.
She is an elected Council member for the Society for the Social Studies of Science, serves a member of the Australian Academy of Science’s National Committee for the History and Philosophy of Science, and is the co-founder of AusSTS—Australia’s largest network of STS scholars.