Project description
Digging deep into future mining operations
The mining industry is constantly evolving. The future of mining is being shaped by new technologies like bots, drones, and autonomous machines. The advent of synthetic minerals or those grown in labs is also changing the dynamics. The EU-funded SYNTHLIVES project will explore the role of human and non-human nature in increasingly synthetic, automated, and digital mining economies. It will conduct a multi-sited and multi-methods study in three case studies: synthetic laboratories, automated mines, and digital and data-driven mining processes. The findings will shed new light on the political, epistemological, ecological, and economic consequences of future mining operations transformed by synthetic properties, autonomous machines, and digital technologies.
Objective
The global extractive industry is undergoing three critical transformations: first, the advent of synthetic or lab-grown minerals, impacting the mining industry and the extraction of resources from nature; second, the creation of fully automated mining operations, seeking to render human work redundant or accessory to that of bots, drones, and other autonomous machines; third, the introduction of digital data and disintermediation technologies for mining management and traceability. Taken together, these innovations anticipate a future of mining that replaces nature with synthetic substances, human labor with intelligent machines, and intermediaries with unmediated accountability. This project responds to these changing conditions with a novel conceptualization of the emergent relationship entangling synthetic and natural objects, humans and machines, material and digital spaces: Synthetic Lives. It asks: What is the role of humans and non-human nature in increasingly synthetic, automated, and digital mining economies? This research innovates by bringing together three related areas of scholarly enquiry: i) resource materialities, to destabilize the divide between nature and culture; ii) mediation and technology, to problematize the separation between humans and machines; iii) algorithmic governance and digital transparency in mining sites, to untangle how material and digital properties are co-produced. Through a multi-sited and multi-methods study, it contributes to these fields of research in three case studies: synthetic laboratories, automated mines, and digital and data-driven mining processes. Interlacing these three foci, Synthetic Lives assists policy-making on environmental, employment, and social-digital issues, and inaugurates a debate of anthropological import: What are the political, epistemological, ecological, and economic consequences of a future that promises to be entangled in synthetic properties, autonomous machines, and digital technologies?
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social sciencessociologygovernance
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringmining and mineral processing
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringroboticsautonomous robotsdrones
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementemployment
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Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
1202 Geneve
Switzerland