Decolonial AI as Disenclosure ()
ABSTRACT
The
development and deployment of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)
engender “AI colonialism”, a term that conceptually overlaps with “data
colonialism”, as a form of injustice. AI colonialism is in need of
decolonization for three reasons. Politically, because it enforces digital
capitalism’s hegemony. Ecologically, as it negatively impacts the environment
and intensifies the extraction of natural resources and consumption of energy.
Epistemically, since the social systems within which AI is embedded reinforce
Western universalism by imposing Western colonial values on the global South
when these manifest in the digital realm is a form of digital capitalism. These
reasons require a new conceptualization of AI decolonization. First this paper
draws from the historical debates on the concepts of colonialism and
decolonization. Secondly it retrieves Achille Mbembe’s notion of decolonization
as disenclosure to argue that the decolonization of AI will have to be the
abolishment of political, ecological and epistemic borders erected and
reinforced in the phases of its design, production, development of AI in the
West and drawing from the knowledge from the global South. In conclusion, it is
discussed how conceiving of decolonial AI as form of disenclosure opens up new
ways to think about and intervene in colonial instantiations of AI development
and deployment, in order to empower “the wretched of AI”, re-ecologise the
unsustainable ecologies AI depends on and to counter the colonial power
structures unreflective AI deployment risks to reinforce.
Share and Cite:
Mollema, W. (2024) Decolonial AI as Disenclosure.
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
12, 574-603. doi:
10.4236/jss.2024.122032.
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