This panel is part of Hacking Alienation: Migrant Power, Art & Tech conference co-organized with Disruption Network Lab.
allapopp (Digital Media and Performance Artist), Milagros Miceli (Sociologist and Computer Scientist, DAIR Institute, AR/DE), Marwa Fatafta (Researcher, Policy Analyst and Digital Rights Expert, PS/DE). Moderated by Walid El-Houri (Researcher and Editor, LBN/DE).
This panel brings together three different situated experiences of the development of AI technologies (including machine learning, digital surveillance, data generation and labelling), challenging the language used to describe them, their inner functioning and their application in both civilian and wartime contexts. Technologies are never neutral and reflect the biases, systemic structures and cultural paradigms of the geographical, social and political contexts in which they are developed. Furthermore, their usage is brining concrete consequences affecting the lives of marginalised communities and contributing in generating transational repression.
While engaging with recent developments in decolonial thought in the field of artificial intelligence, such as the Decolonial AI Manyfesto and embracing both personal hopes and discomfort caused by the expanding post-Soviet decolonial dialogue, with its new hot spot in Berlin, allapopp envisioned an ambitious experiment: to facilitate a conversation about technology in general, and the future with AI in particular, led by “us*- born on the (post)colonial margins of post-Soviet translocal experiences, cultural, geopolitical, and ethnic half-bloods.” By doing so, allapopp aims for these imaginations to enter a tangible realm of technological envisioning – envisioning futurities as a means of political participation and self-determination. And while doing so, allapopp continuously wonders: who is us*?
Through a specific investigation of data work, the often overlooked labour essential to creating datasets, Milagros Miceli discusses how it plays a critical role in shaping AI technologies. In this talk, she will present findings from the Data Workers’ Inquiry, a community-based research project conducted with 15 data workers. She will describe how issues of migration, exploration, and power shape data work, significantly impacting datasets and AI systems, and argue for the importance of addressing historical inequities, labour conditions, and epistemological standpoints when discussing AI Ethics. This talk will also highlight the need for new research questions and methodologies to better understand the complexities of AI data work.
Looking beyond the harms or ‘side effects’ of AI and its dangerous impact on marginalised and racialised communities, Marwa Fatafta‘s presentation draws on the current reality of occupied Palestine, where these technologies have been designed to automate systematic discrimination, human rights abuses, and large-scale killing. She will discuss Israel’s recent use of AI systems in warfare to surveil, target, and bomb civilians and civilian infrastructure on an industrial scale in Gaza and its implication on a global scale. Far from being an isolated issue in a faraway land, she will showcase how these battle-tested technologies and systems – and the industries behind them – are often repurposed to fuel the oppression and crackdown on migrants and minorities here in Europe. Finally, she’ll delve into the complicity of big tech in providing the technologies or services underpinning these abusive systems without transparency and how we can hold them accountable.
