Lingnan Foundation Distinguished Lecture Series "The Politics and Poetics of AI: From Great Power Competition to Imaginaries of Good Life"

Drawing on media anthropologist Brian Larkin's account of the "politics and poetics of infrastructure," this talk reads AI infrastructure as both. Its politics lie in the political rationality of development and security policy, which casts data, compute, and digital innovation as engines of growth and power. Its poetics lie in discourses that store within them desire and fantasy, taking on fetish-like aspects. The talk treats the social imaginary as the shared understanding that confers legitimacy—a terrain of historical layering and contestation. It reads U.S. and Chinese imaginaries of AI side by side: competing diagnoses of the role of the state, of the trajectories of innovation, and of the recoupling of technology to national purpose. These are not merely strategic postures but rival visions of the good life. Because the politics and poetics of AI are mutually constitutive, asking whose flourishing its imaginaries authorise is already a political and geopolitical question..