This keynote of the Critical Minerals symposium was delivered by Associate Professor Tom Nurmi (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) on 7 November 2025.
Abstract: As a way of opening the “Critical Minerals Symposium,” this paper provides both continuity with the larger “Minerals” project – including previous roundtables and symposia – and a broad canvas for today’s panels that looks more philosophically at minerals in our contemporary era, especially around emerging technologies that use large language models and intensive computing inputs like AI. These minerally-resourced technologies are, as we know, extensions of existing assemblages of extractive, biopolitical power being used in new, more penetrative modes of knowledge capture and data surveillance from boardrooms to classrooms. But understanding AI as a material constellation of mineral resources with enormous environmental and intellectual costs is a less familiar story, one that requires a look to the past, to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With special attention to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, specifically his 1860 essays “Power” and “Wealth,” I develop a reading of minerality’s historical relation to knowledge: a geological prosthetic that founds our technological imagination and shapes the boundaries of what can be thought. The paper concludes with a consideration of the popular American children’s textbook The Strange Adventures of a Pebble (1921) for its capacity to reveal certain insights about the geontological conditions of modernity through the affordances of literary forms which play with anthropomorphic perspective and meaning making. Ultimately, I hope to situate the appearance of AI in wider technological histories and intellectual traditions that enable us to theorize the infrastructures of minerality, materially and figuratively.