Accumulations of Artificial Intelligence in East Asia: An Archaeology of Experiments, Institutions, and Policies in Taiwan and Japan

There are growing concerns regarding potential or emergent reconfigurations of social and spatial relations through the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI). This article contributes to the critical examination of such reconfigurations in two ways. It suggests that an archaeological approach can be productive for examining how AI has accumulated in a wide range of infrastructural, institutional, and policy arrangements. This approach pays attention to both monumental accumulations that establish AI as key to future societal, economic, and technological developments, and peripheral mutations for becoming sensitized to different localizations of AI. Furthermore, by bringing Taiwan and Japan into the discussion, the article takes seriously the different regularities of engineering AI and digital futures, and highlights the different spatial, institutional, and historical specificities that shape the engineering process. Overall, the article provides an analysis of the accumulations of AI that probes deeper into machine learning experiments occurring in East Asia and tracks how these experiments are situated in broader geopolitical, institutional, and historical conjunctions. This way of unpacking AI raises further questions concerning when, where, and how algorithmic futures emerge, as well as what data, infrastructural, and institutional practices might appear and take root.