AI is creating a new colonial world order
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
1. Artificial intelligence is creating a new colonial world order An MIT Technology Review series investigates how AI is enriching a powerful few by dispossessing communities that have been dispossessed before
2. As I simultaneously read The Costs of Connection, one of the foundational texts that first proposed a “data colonialism,” I realized that these cities were the birthplaces of European colonialism—cities through which Christopher Columbus traveled as he voyaged back and forth to the Americas, and through which the Spanish crown transformed the world order
3. South Africa’s private surveillance machine is fueling a digital apartheid; as firms have dumped their AI technologies into the country, it’s created a blueprint for how to surveil citizens and serves as a warning to the world
4. While it would diminish the depth of past traumas to say the AI industry is repeating this violence today, it is now using other, more insidious means to enrich the wealthy and powerful at the great expense of the poor
5. It’s not possible to talk about “AI for everyone” (Google’s rhetoric), “responsible AI” (Facebook’s rhetoric), or “broadly distribut[ing]” its benefits (OpenAI’s rhetoric) without honestly acknowledging and confronting the obstacles in the way
6. But it has developed new ways of exploiting cheap and precarious labor, often in the Global South, shaped by implicit ideas that such populations don’t need—or are less deserving of—livable wages and economic stability
7. The more users a company can acquire for its products, the more subjects it can have for its algorithms, and the more resources—data—it can harvest from their activities, their movements, and even their bodies
8. My hope is that this series can provide a prompt for what “decolonial AI” might look like—and an invitation, because there’s so much more to explore