Alongside decarbonization and electrification efforts, the global extractive industry is undergoing three critical transformations: first, the advent of biomining and lab-grown minerals, impacting the role of nature in extractive processes; second, the creation of fully automated mining operations, rendering human work redundant or accessory to that of bots, drones, and other autonomous machines; third, the introduction of digital data and disintermediation technologies, reshaping management and traceability practices.

Taken together, these innovations anticipate a future of mining that harnesses nature while replacing it with synthetic substances, human labor with intelligent machines, and intermediaries with unmediated accountability. This research project responds to these changing conditions with a novel conceptualization of the emergent relationship entangling synthetic and natural objects, humans and machines, and 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 and biomining technologies, 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 bio-synthetic properties, autonomous machines, and digital technologies? SynthLives is funded by the European Research Council (ERC-2020-STG-SYNTHLIVES- 950672)