Artificial Intelligence Inherits a Past. A Conversation with Gabriele Balbi

Philip  Di Salvo

doi:10.57611/qts.v5i1.646

Autori

Philip Di Salvo University of St. Gallen https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2165-0590

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.57611/qts.v5i1.646

Parole chiave:

artificial intelligence, media history, platformization

Abstract

In this interview, Prof. Gabriele Balbi reflects on the historical and material conditions of contemporary artificial intelligence (AI). Drawing on his work as a media historian, the conversation resists the prevailing tendency to apprehend the present moment in AI as historically unprecedented and instead situates the current "summer" of generative AI within the longer trajectory of digitalization, the platform economy, and the cycles of hype through which "revolutionary" technologies have repeatedly been announced and absorbed. From this perspective, Balbi argues that generative AI is less a rupture than a continuation: heir to the financialization, extractivism, and ideological framings of earlier digital formations, it can know only what has already been written, even as it promises to author the future. The conversation considers the political economy of the major AI platforms, the materiality of computation, the geographies of innovation beyond the Sino-American duopoly, and the paradox of a technology that announces the future while reinstating the extractive logics of the nineteenth century.

Biografia autore

Philip Di Salvo, University of St. Gallen

Philip Di Salvo is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Media and Communications Management (MCM), University of St. Gallen (HSG), Switzerland. His primary research interests include investigative journalism, internet surveillance, the intersection of journalism and hacking, and black box technologies. Previously, he served as a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) from 2021 to 2022. From 2012 to 2021, he held various research and teaching roles at the Institute of Media and Journalism, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). In the summer of 2024, Philip was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. Between 2018 and 2020, he also taught as a Lecturer at NABA – New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Italy. Philip is the author of two books: “Leaks. Whistleblowing e hacking nell’età senza segreti” (LUISS University Press, Rome, 2019) and “Digital Whistleblowing Platforms in Journalism. Encrypting Leaks” (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2020).