AI Ethics for Leaders: Why Context and Critical Thinking Matter More Than Ever

AI Ethics for Leaders: Why Context and Critical Thinking Matter More Than Ever.

Meike’s Reflections on Artificial Intelligence

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AI Ethics for Leaders: Why Context and Critical Thinking Matter More Than Ever

Meike’s Reflections on Artificial Intelligence

This is the first part of a new AI blog series by our Senior Learning Architect, Meike Hinnenberg. Read her thoughts below and stay tuned for more parts to come!

The history of mining, like the devastation it leaves in its wake, is commonly overlooked in the strategic amnesia that accompanies stories of technological progress. […] As San Francisco drew enormous wealth from the mines, it was easy for the populace to forget where it all came from […] Just like the mines that served San Francisco in the nineteenth century, extraction for the technology sector is done by keeping real costs out of sight.

(Kate Crawford: Atlas of AI)

[…] – that is, as I said, the use of active forgetfulness, a porter at the door, so to speak, a custodian of psychic order, quiet, etiquette. From that we can see at once how, if forgetfulness were not present, there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hoping, no pride, no present.

(Friedrich Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals)

It is immediately by deviating from equilibrium of animals, from tranquility – a departure engendered by the fault of Epimetheus – that mortals occur. Before the deviation, there is nothing. Then the accidental event happens, the fault of Epimetheus: to have forgotten humans. Humans are the forgotten ones. Humans only occur through their being forgotten; they only appear in disappearing.

(Bernard Stiegler: Technics and Time, 1)

Introduction

It is the beginning of February 2026 in Berlin; shortly after the big blackout in southern Berlin; shortly after several deaths and devastating losses in southern Europe in the wake of Storm Harry; shortly after a judge of the International Criminal Court was sanctioned by the United States; shortly after a cold wave driven by a destabilized jet stream claimed lives in the U.S.; shortly after deadly storms and floods across South and Southeast Asia left thousands displaced, hundreds dead and entire regions submerged; shortly after Russian strikes left thousands of households in Kyiv without heating while, almost in the same breath, the Ukrainian government entrusted the development of the namesake lithium deposit in the Kirovohrad region to TechMet – an Irish company partly backed by the U.S. government’s Development Finance Corporation and the U.S. financial firm Rock Holdings – drawing the country into the competitive circuitry of the global battery economy; shortly after …

It is the beginning of February 2026 in Berlin, and the air outside is sharp with cold. Inside my aging apartment, warmth gathers despite the leaky windows. The radiators whisper with gas that has traveled from Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United States, or Azerbaijan, holding back the easterly winds for now. I sit in my kitchen. Milk warms slowly on the stove; coffee – probably carried from Africa, Asia, or South America – rises in the espresso pot and fills the room with its wonderful, familiar scent.

I open my computer, assembled through supply chains that fade into opacity, dependent on minerals, infrastructures, and forms of labor that rarely enter the frame. I open it to read the news and to begin research for a series on AI I am planning to write – aware, somewhere in the background, that even a question posed to a machine draws on energies and resources far beyond the gesture of typing it.

From this kitchen table, my orientation turns toward two recent points of departure: Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI and her video essay  Mapping Empires.

Chapter I – The Dispositif of Artificial Intelligence

In Atlas of AI, Kate Crawford peels back the layers – conceptual and material alike – that have accrued around what we have come to call Artificial Intelligence, revealing a construct whose hidden assumptions we inhabit daily, largely unaware of the consequences they set in motion.

Her analysis unfolds as a kind of cartography, recalling Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the dispositif: a field traced by lines of visibility and invisibility, by grand narratives and what they render mute, by modes of subjectivation, fractures, continuities, and crossings – lines that intersect and mutate without ever solidifying into a universal structure.

Technologies of Domination

To draw nearer to this dispositif, to traverse its terrain, Crawford adopts the figure of the atlas. The atlas makes palpable the material and spatial dimensions condensed under the name Artificial Intelligence, even as these very conditions – its infrastructures, labors, and extractive foundations – are frequently displaced from view. 

At the same time, it affirms the situatedness of all knowledge: each map offers only a partial orientation, shaped by choices of scale, emphasis, and omission. In this convergence of aesthetic visual ordering and epistemic claim, Crawford shows that mapping is not a neutral description but a creative and political act.

Even as Crawford insists on the partiality of her own account – presenting her work as an invitation to follow emerging paths, to linger in zones of disparity, and to witness how particular perspectives come into being – she remains attentive to the darker history of the atlas itself. For atlases have never been innocent instruments of orientation alone; they have also served as technologies of domination.

The God’s Eye View

It is precisely this ambivalence that grounds her central hypothesis: that under the name Artificial Intelligence, such cartographic power is once again being mobilized. Along familiar routes of colonial exploitation and driven by an ambition no longer to draw an atlas of the world but to stand in for it, this impulse recentralizes power within the field of AI, advancing claims of universality and totality that rest on extractive regimes.

In doing so, it seeks to translate movement, communication, and labor into data, rendering the world legible from what Crawford describes as a supposedly objective, centralized “God’s eye view”.

Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization

The atlas itself operates through a double movement of what Deleuze would call deterritorialization and reterritorialization. While its cartographic abstractions unsettle fixed spatial relations and open new pathways of thought, they also carry a long-standing capacity for capture and domination.

Crawford’s intervention can be read as an attempt to amplify the deterritorializing potential of the atlas, even as she meticulously traces the reterritorializing operations to which colonialism and contemporary AIrepeatedly return.

The Ethical Task

Dispositifs, as singular and historically situated configurations, neither begin from nor arrive at the universal. And yet, in their operation, they repeatedly give rise to gestures of universalization and ambitions of totality, effects that emerge from within rather than from any transcendent ground. It is for this reason that such claims need to be traced genealogically, followed back along the paths through which they come to assert themselves.

Against this horizon, the ethical task is not to oppose totalization with a quasi-moralistic counter-universal, but to remain attentive to these movements as they unfold: to introduce shifts, frictions, and alternative pathways that keep the field open.

Ethical resistance, if it is to remain worthy of the name, must itself resist the temptation of ideology, universalization, and closure. For wherever resistance hardens into morally indignant certainty or ideological form, it risks reproducing – under the guise of critique – the very logics of universalization and reterritorialization it set out to unsettle.