Author(s): Emiliano Treré
Date: August 2026
Etiquetas: Infrastructural inevitability, Temporal foreclosure, Data Centres, Artificial intelligence, Computational expansion
When does a technological choice start to feel inevitable?
Drawing inspiration from Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, this commentary looks at what happens when AI and its infrastructures are presented as developments that simply cannot be stopped. It introduces the idea of temporal foreclosure to describe how urgency reduces the time available for public scrutiny and debate. It then explores infrastructural inevitability, i.e. the assumption that more data centres, more computing capacity and more AI are simply the direction in which societies must travel. The article asks how we can keep other possibilities open, including slowing down, building less or deciding that some forms of computation are not needed.