Do Machines Care? Another Solarpunk Manifesto

Content

In 1950, when AI research was still in its infancy, Alan Turing posed the now-famous question: “Can
machines think?” But since today's large language models like ChatGPT have rendered this question largely obsolete, Zihao Zhang poses another question: Do machines care? This Zube Lecture will begin by exploring the technical and ethical dimensions of this question. I will then introduce solarpunk as a framework to reframe the inquiry through storytelling and speculative narrative. Solarpunk challenges dominant tropes of technological rivalry and dystopia, offering instead visions of co-productive intelligence—imagining machine intelligence not as an adversary, but as a partner in “staying with the trouble.”

About the Speaker

Zihao Zhang is a designer, educator, and scholar in landscape architecture. As a landscape theorist, he provides critical analyses of the entanglement between nature and technology, the human and nonhuman realms, as well as ecosystems and intelligent machines. Through building transdisciplinary investigation across design, engineering, and environmental humanities, his book Cybernetics and the Constructed Environment interrogates the ramifications of cybernetics on contemporary culture and the constructed environment.  His design experiments (https://oseresearch.com) inspire innovative landscape strategies to address pressing issues such as the climate crisis and social injustice, along with their cumulative effects on communities and urban landscapes.

Zihao Zhang currently serves as an assistant professor and director of the landscape architecture program
at the City College of New York Spitzer School of Architecture.