The bare life of weeds: A biopolitics of AI and robotic agricultural Weed Technologies

As conventional chemical methods of weed control come under increasing scrutiny, the agri-tech industry has turned to artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to combat the evolving ‘weed problem’. However, the intervention of AI and robotics into agricultural weed management in this ‘post-herbicide’ era poses new questions for human-weed relations. Although attention has been paid to the social and ethical impacts of agricultural AI and robotics in general, there has been less focus on its nonhuman impacts, in particular, the consequences for weed and plant life. Therefore, this paper examines AI and robotic agricultural weed systems and asks how it reproduces new biopolitical norms for human-weed relations under changing technological conditions. I review the literature on AI and robotic weed technologies, in addition to broader social science scholarship of weeds, to argue that the turn to AI and robotics is a biopolitical move that reconfigures the capital-colonial categorisation of agricultural weeds and thus forecloses sustainable agri-futures. I demonstrate how AI and robotics reshape biopolitical norms of weeds based on a logic of immunity which works to program weeds as ‘bare life’ and, in turn, enable the industrial expansion of new weed technologies by further legitimating the indiscriminate eradication of uncommodifiable plant life. In doing so, I briefly propose relations with weeds through an affirmative biopolitics to unsettle the technocratic categorisations of weeds and make visible their status as vital beings for collaborative and multispecies futures.