Description
- Decolonizing Euro-centric Ethics
- Exploring other ways of doing ethics together
Further information
This value uses post-colonial and decolonial theories, in understanding and shaping the ongoing advances in artificial intelligence. It supports abolitionist movements that resist and fight to end policing, criminalization, and carceral logics and technologies in all their forms.
- “The growth of community-controlled technologies, of mutual aid and care support networks remind us: surveillance, prisons and police don’t keep us safe. We keep us safe. Queer, Trans, Two-Spirit, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities are disproportionately impacted by surveillance and criminalization at all levels—from the state-endorsed to the corporate-led”. (Emmer el al. 2020)
We honor and are grateful for the legacy of abolitionist activists, organizers, and policy writers, whose work has challenged us to imagine transformative responses to injustice. Safety and security narratives are used to justify mass surveillance and community controls, eroding human rights by criminalizing and marginalising minorities and in general those who do not fit with the system’s narrow parameters.
For example, in recent months, as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have begun using contact tracing technology—the use of personal location data on cell phones—to track the virus. Without safeguards, this technology can be repurposed to further surveil and repress organizers, particularly at protests.
Internet shutdowns in countries of Latin America and Southeast Asia in response to COVID-19 are further examples of the ways in which governments have co-opted technology to repress citizens, exacerbating inequalities in accessing timely health and other critical information. Some of the proposed actions are to call for public and private investment in abolitionist technologies – creative interventions that use art, media, and performance to galvanize public support against state-backed surveillance; to fund community technologists and community political theorists in creative critical-technical practice of AI; to invest in healing justice – by seeking reverse tutelage and reverse pedagogies, and, emphasising community distributed safety protocols, rather than individual, to renew affective and political communities.
In essence, this work is a political call for human rights, spaces and tools to meaningfully express concern and revoke consent.
Resources
- Lewis, Jason Edward, ed. 2020. Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper. Honolulu, Hawaiʻi: The Initiative for Indigenous Futures and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).
- Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence (Jul 2020), Mohamed et al.