The Slow Violence of the Anthropocene: Ecological Degradation, Qualitative Ethics, and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is often presented as immaterial and purely computational, obscuring the infrastructures that sustain it through extraction, accumulation, and waste. Drawing on theories of slow violence, infrastructure, and settler colonialism, we examine how AI reproduces colonial logics of dispossession by rendering lands, labor, and knowledge extractable. Through three interconnected dimensions, we argue that qualitative research ethics must extend beyond human subjects to confront our complicity in the ecological and colonial violence of AI use. Rather than resolution, we offer questions about accountability, refusal, and what it means to produce knowledge through and with AI.