AI innovation is the holy grail of capital accumulation

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the holy grail of capital accumulation and socio-political control in contemporary societies. Consequently, companies and governments are rapidly adopting AI as a fundamental tool to increase productivity and efficiency. However, the deployment of AI has also shown great potential for harm, especially for racialized women, non-binary people, and groups in other vulnerable situations like platform workers, immigrants, and refugees. The AI industry is predominantly located in a few countries, which increases the wealth gap between high-income economies in the Global North that produce these technologies, and low-income countries in the Global South that consume these technologies and provide the data for the AI industry to grow. Therefore, this hegemonic industry is contributing to the deepening of systemic inequalities globally.

To respond to the growing concerns of civil society about the negative impacts of AI, large tech corporations have developed ethical frameworks to reduce the potential harm associated with the deployment of AI technologies. In general, these frameworks provide narrow technical fixes to socio-technical problems, and in many cases, are just part of a broader strategy for ethics washing. However, UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, signed by 193 states in November 2021, provides a more comprehensive approach to AI risks. The framework considers the complete AI lifecycle (design, development, deployment, use, and disposal) and pays special attention to gender equality, cultural diversity, and the environment. However, to see this or any other ethical framework materialize, we need to remember that AI is a matter of power. It is used as a geopolitical tool that allows the concentration of wealth, knowledge, and control. This power concentration generates global asymmetries that contribute to the reproduction of oppressive systems such as capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.

In this essay, I suggest advancing the feminist and decolonial imagination to develop AI technologies under ethical frameworks that consider intersecting systems of oppression at every step of the AI lifecycle. I also provide examples of AI projects that help us imagine alternative feminist and decolonial technological futures. I conclude by offering possible interventions to build technologies aligned with the right to a dignified life for humans and other beings, and to ensure that the rights of nature are respected.

Decolonizing and Depatriarchalizing AI

Decolonial studies comprise a heterogeneous set of thoughts characterized by the epistemic domination of the rational and modern Western thought that marks the beginning of modernity and the consolidation of the capitalist system. According to the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, the coloniality of power is the “colonial reason” that controls material resources, bodies, territories, subjectivities, intersubjectivities, and knowledge to accomplish the colonial, modern, eurocentric project. Coloniality is the sediment of the colonial experience in contemporary times. It explains the logic that sustains the supremacy of the West. This form of dominion is asserted through the imposition of universal forms of being (social hierarchies of gender, race, class, ability, language, and other intersectionalities), knowing (positivism, rationalism, binarisms), feeling (separation of affect and cognition, subordination of emotions and affects, secularism), doing (efficiency, utility, productivity), and living (consumerism, commodification, individualism). Colonization birthed modern capitalist societies through the dispossession of territories, labor exploitation, and violence against women. Dismantling these interconnected oppressions — materialized in the coloniality of being, knowing, feeling, doing, and living that they sustain — is necessary to decolonize the current hegemonic socio-technical systems. AI reproduces dispossession through data extractivism, epistemic violence, social orders of classification, and automated impoverishment. Therefore, to achieve gender equality, social, and environmental justice, we need to decolonize and depatriachalize AI, moving it away from the circles of capitalist accumulation, and from colonial and patriarchal relations.

A feminist decolonial imagination seeks to eradicate multidimensional socio-technical violence in the interconnectedness of oppressive systems. In this endeavor, it is crucial to unveil how the AI lifecycle and its associated social processes operate cognitively, emotionally, and pragmatically to construct worldviews and ways of relating and conceiving social existence. For example, AI technologies, particularly machine learning (ML) models, are used to decide who will be more inclined to commit a crime, who fits better to get financial aid or a job, what languages and whose knowledge is elevated, etc. Due to the biases incorporated in data and algorithmic models, and the punitive use of these technologies, the results of the deployment of intelligent systems in society are often discriminatory against women, non-binary people, immigrants, low-income groups, non-white populations, and non-English speakers. For example, the US Department of Homeland Security relies heavily on cloud services, surveillance technology, and predictive analytics to keep immigrants under check. This way, these technologies are deployed to deepen social asymmetries and knowledge gaps. Therefore, the questions that need to be asked are: Who collects and uses whose data? How is this done? Why is data collected? Who designs the algorithms and for whom? Who is benefiting from the deployment of ML models? What purposes does automation serve? What notions of gender, race, class, and justice are reinforced? What narratives, visions of the world, and imaginaries of the future are promoted and at what cost?

The effects of AI are visible in the configuration of multiple relationships at the micro, meso, and macro levels. On the one hand, at the micro level, our personal, social, cultural, and political relationships are algorithmically mediated. For example, there is evidence of digital interactions on social media negatively impacting the mental health of teen girls. Similarly, the commercialization of data implies a privacy risk, because our digital traces can be linked with our identities and used to influence our behaviors. At the meso level, algorithmically-enabled misinformation has a differentiated impact on minorities. Simultaneously, at the macro level, algorithmic manipulation has endangered Global South democracies by fueling extremism and polarization. Human-machine interactions also redefine the conception of what it means to be human, the limits and possibilities of human agency, and the power of algorithms in our lives. Additionally, new questions emerge with the advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G technologies, which foster ubiquitous communication between machines, and lead to the permanent surveillance of human life. As a result of capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal systems of dispossession and exploitation, AI material production is dissociated from its effects on racialized women’s bodies and the territories they inhabit. Marginalized women and girls in the Global South are fundamental agents in the global supply chains that enable technological development. The territories they inhabit provide the natural resources required to produce technology. Women’s labor is fundamental to the digital economy. However, women and girls, especially from Southern countries are excluded from the circles of privilege that determine the direction of global AI governance, design, or audits. Despite this reality, when deployed, AI systems disproportionately affect Global South communities and territories, deepening the economic, socio-cultural, and knowledge inequalities between regions.