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Distance & Presence
Can AI genuinely reduce the disadvantages of remoteness in education, health, administration and specialist services?
Artificial Intelligence · Islands · Futures
AI-slands
What changes when artificial intelligence is viewed from islands rather than from the metropolitan centres where most digital futures are imagined?
Why AI-slands?
Most accounts of artificial intelligence begin with corporations, laboratories, cities and global infrastructure. AI-slands begins somewhere else: with island communities and the experience of living at the edge of systems.
AI may compress distance, but islands remind us that distance is never only physical.
From the island outwardStart with island experience rather than importing metropolitan assumptions.
Connection and disconnectionAsk what AI changes when transport, broadband, power and services are already uneven.
Resilience without romanticismExplore adaptive capacity without treating island communities as laboratories or curiosities.
Culture mattersLanguage, memory, heritage and local knowledge are as important as technical infrastructure.
Research Themes
Six lines of enquiry turn AI-slands from a technology project into an Island Studies project.
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Culture & Language
What happens when small languages, dialects, oral traditions and local knowledge enter systems trained mainly on large global datasets?
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Resilience
Could AI strengthen small communities by extending capacity—or increase dependency on distant platforms and infrastructure?
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Governance & Autonomy
How might AI affect local government, public services, democratic participation and island autonomy?
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Work & Demography
Could distributed AI-enabled work support population retention, or will automation hollow out already-fragile labour markets?
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Energy & Infrastructure
AI is immaterial only in appearance. Data centres, networks and computation have physical energy, environmental and geopolitical footprints.
AI-slands Symposium
A proposed one-day meeting bringing Island Studies into conversation with AI research, public policy, digital humanities and island communities.
A Northern and Arctic research conversation
Thinking about AI from islands
The symposium is designed around questions rather than predictions: what might AI enable, what might it erode, and what becomes visible when its effects are examined from northern and island contexts?
Opening: Why islands are a distinctive place from which to think about AI.
Session I: Remoteness, connectivity and access to services.
Session II: Language, heritage, culture and machine representation.
Session III: Work, education, demography and island futures.
Session IV: Governance, autonomy, ethics and technological dependence.
Roundtable: What would an island-centred AI research agenda look like?
An Archipelago of Questions
Select an island to explore how different settings generate different AI questions. These are comparative research prompts, not fixed conclusions.
North Atlantic case study
Shetland
Remote service provision, energy systems, cultural identity, education, population retention and the relationship between local agency and externally controlled infrastructure.
Questions AI-slands Should Ask
The project is strongest when it resists the temptation to assume that technological adoption is automatically beneficial.
Can AI make remoteness matter less?
AI might extend specialist knowledge into places where expertise is scarce. But digital access cannot replace every form of physical presence, infrastructure or human relationship. Which forms of distance can AI genuinely compress, and which remain?
Who owns the intelligence?
If island services become dependent on systems owned elsewhere, apparent local capacity may conceal a new form of external dependence. AI-slands therefore asks about ownership, control, data and technological sovereignty.
What happens to small cultures inside large models?
Small languages, minority histories and locally specific knowledge may be under-represented or distorted. Islands offer a powerful setting for examining whose knowledge becomes machine-readable and whose remains marginal.
Could AI strengthen island demography?
Remote work, distributed expertise and improved services could make island residence more viable. But automation could also remove jobs, centralise decision-making and weaken local institutions. The demographic consequences deserve direct study.
What would an island-centred ethics of AI look like?
It would pay attention to scale, dependence, community, environmental limits, cultural continuity and the consequences of decisions made far from the places where those decisions are felt.
Working Papers
Developing arguments and research methods from the AI-slands programme, shared to invite scholarly discussion and empirical testing.
AI-SLANDS WORKING PAPER NO. 1
AI-slands: Towards an Island-Centred Approach to Artificial Intelligence
This working paper sets out the conceptual framework for AI-slands. It asks how artificial intelligence looks when viewed from islands rather than metropolitan centres, and develops five related ideas: AI archipelagos, algorithmic mainlanding, digital double insularity, synthetic islandness and insular AI sovereignty. The paper argues that AI may reduce some consequences of geographical distance while increasing dependence on distant infrastructures, platforms and representational systems.
From Project to Observatory
AI-slands can grow into a living research network rather than remaining a record of a single event.
Island Case Studies
Short place-based studies documenting how AI affects education, culture, public services, work and governance.
People & Partners
Researchers, island organisations, UArctic connections, students and practitioners contributing different disciplinary and geographic perspectives.
AI-slands Observatory
A future research resource tracking projects, policies and experiments where AI and island futures intersect.
ABOUT
Project Lead
AI-slands is led by Andrew Jennings, Professor in Island Studies at the Institute for Northern Studies, University of the Highlands and Islands. The project explores artificial intelligence from island-centred perspectives.
CONTACT
Join the Conversation
Researchers, island organisations, students and practitioners are invited to contribute island case studies, symposium papers or ideas for collaboration.
Contact / Contribute