6/24/2019 IEEE Software Blog: Can AI be Decolonial?

Monday, June 24, 2019

Can AI be Decolonial?
By: Asma Mansoor
Associate Editor: Muneera Bano (@DrMuneeraBano)

In a world marked by economic, racial and gender-based hierarchies, can AI be

decolonial?
If not, can it become decolonial?

These questions might elicit criticism since computing and its associated fields are generally assumed
to be democratic in flavour, working in a realm where constructs such as race and gender are thought
to be reduced to irrelevant abstractions. But it is precisely this reduction that I find problematic
specifically in a world in which many regions are still experiencing a colonial hangover in the form of
neocolonial exploitation. This exploitation, galvanized by various Capitalist corporate structures,
manifests itself via technological interventions, such as surveillance and drone technology,
biotechnology and the abuse and degradation of indigenous environments in the garb of progress.
Since the fifteenth century onwards, European colonization has been supplemented by technological
advancements which have helped consolidate the various Others of the West. As cyberspace expands
and AI becomes more autonomous, what is gradually becoming a matter of concern for numerous
people living in the Global South like myself, are the possible colonial implications of these
advancements. Our fears are not unfounded. The CIA’s Weeping Angel program, that permitted the
installation of spying software on smart TVs, was sanctioned for devices headed to countries
suspected of harbouring and supporting terrorism. This reflects how surveillance technologies are
operating as tools of Othering in the hands of Euro-American power structures, inferiorizing peoples
and countries. Technology in all its forms is helping supra-national Capitalist conglomerates to become
increasingly colonial as they impose their sovereign rights to regulate and manipulate the technology
that they ration out to states and groups as we saw in the case of Facebook. So to question whether
AI, as a component of this technological colonization, can be decolonial becomes a rather loaded
question which cannot be answered in a simple manner.

What I imply by decoloniality is not an end of colonization, per se. I take it in the connotations of Walter
Mignolo who defines decoloniality as a non-hierarchical inter-epistemological exchange that
encourages epistemic disobedience and delinking from its colonial epistemologies in order to build a
world where many worlds can exist in a state of non-hierarchical epistemic osmosis. However, our
world is also an age of the Empire, where the Empire, according to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,

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6/24/2019 IEEE Software Blog: Can AI be Decolonial?

is the sovereign power that regulates global exchanges. As opposed to the decolonial ethos which
advocates a cross-cultural exchange of knowledge without centralizing any mode of thinking, this
Empire also encourages this decentered osmosis, at least in theory if not in practice. What makes the
operations of this global Empire different from decolonial politics is that the Empire upholds its
epistemic sovereignty and cannot afford to decentralize its economic, technological and intellectual
supremacy. Computing and AI are vital components in this global regulatory apparatus.

Therefore, I believe that at the present moment in time, AI is not decolonial unless the formerly
colonized appropriate it for their interests, a task which I am convinced is fraught with obstacles. AI
responds to the master because it is programmed by the master who needs to uphold global
hierarchies and inequalities. It operates as the Golem in the hands of the Global Capitalist masters,
ensuring on their part who is to be excluded and who is to be included and the extent to which they are
to be included.

Biases are encoded within its very algorithmic genes as the works of Safiya Umoja Noble and David
Beer indicate. It inherits the aesthetic biases of its makers, including those governing the perceptions
of race and gender. An international beauty contest judged by AI machines in 2016 revealed that these
machines did not consider dark skin as beautiful. The driverless cars are more likely to hit people with
darker skin. AI-based voice assistants have been reported to respond less to different accents or the
voices of women.

Like Macaulay’s Minute Men, AI is also a product of colonial mentality. It does not only absorb the
colonisers’ ways of knowing but also the prescriptions of bodily aesthetics. However, at the current
moment in time, AI is better than Macaulay’s Minute Men who experienced displaced and schismatic
identities in their effort to become like the Masters. The AI, at present, is not aware of these
complexes. Perhaps, in a few years, as it gains sentience, AI would develop similar complexes in its
efforts to become more human. At the moment, it is fully complicit with the neocolonial agenda wherein
all Others are equal but some Others are more Other than Others. It keeps an eye on rogue elements,
further marginalizing those who are already marginalized. It is not decolonial precisely because it is
supplementing the hierarchies that decoloniality sets out to dismantle.

So what needs to be done? Perhaps, a more acute awareness of what goes into its programing needs
to be rethought and that can be done by taking on board, social, philosophical and literary theorists.
Perhaps then can the decolonization of AI truly begin.

Dr Muneera Bano at 6:57 AM

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1 comment:

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6/24/2019 IEEE Software Blog: Can AI be Decolonial?

Didar Zowghi June 24, 2019 at 8:40 AM

It is indeed an intersting piece and surely thought provoking in typical @asmaarwen style... But what if
most of the AI code is written by those whose ethnicity is from heavily colonised countries? Would this be
their last chance to put an end to colonialism and decolonise AI?
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