Good for whom?

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

Here is a brief description of the book:

Two authors with decades of experience promoting human rights argue that, as the world changes around us, rights hardly imaginable today will come into being. A rights revolution is under way. Today the range of nonhuman entities thought to deserve rights is exploding—not just animals but ecosystems and even robots. Changes in norms and circumstances require the expansion of rights: What new rights, for example, are needed if we understand gender to be nonbinary? Does living in a corrupt state violate our rights? And emerging technologies demand that we think about old rights in new ways: When biotechnology is used to change genetic code, whose rights might be violated? What rights, if any, protect our privacy from the intrusions of sophisticated surveillance techniques? Drawing on their vast experience as human rights advocates, William Schulz and Sushma Raman challenge us to think hard about how rights evolve with changing circumstances, and what rights will look like ten, twenty, or fifty years from now. Against those who hold that rights are static and immutable, Schulz and Raman argue that rights must adapt to new realities or risk being consigned to irrelevance. To preserve and promote the good society—one that protects its members’ dignity and fosters an environment in which people will want to live—we must at times rethink the meanings of familiar rights and consider the introduction of entirely new rights. Now is one of those times. The Coming Good Society details the many frontiers of rights today and the debates surrounding them. Schulz and Raman equip us with the tools to engage the present and future of rights so that we understand their importance and know where we stand.

From a Counter-Racist perspective, it is important to interrogate the sophisticated/refined nature of the discourse at work here given the tacit liberal diversity and inclusion language. However, before getting into the work itself, consider the white hand of the robot in the above graphic which suggests that the good society will be good for those bringing this techno-centric “new reality” into being, viz. the smartest and most powerful people in the known universe [= White Supremacists (Racists)] and their intended beneficiaries, i.e. all white people (excluding those Race Traitors who attempt to RWSWJ, i.e. Replace White Supremacy With Justice].

And who gets to afford rights to these artifacts if not their (white) creators? Who gets to afford rights per se under contemporary globally operating conditions of Racism (White Supremcy)?

Finally, is the apple in the above graphic an indication that the White Supremacist (Racist) creating is envisaging bringing forth a robot Adam in this “new reality”? And is this robot Adam intended to bring about a redemption from the lapserian (i.e. ‘fallen’) condition that Western Christianity sought for so long through technological means according to David F. Noble, author of the seminal work The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (1997)?

Peace

On the Politics and Ideology of Artificial Intelligence

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

A couple of months back, I finished reading Artificial Whiteness: The Politics and Ideology of Artificial Intelligence by Yarden Katz (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2021). The author is a white Jewish anti-Zionist male with an interesting geneaology which he sets out on pages 15 and 16 of the Introduction to the book. (Katz has recently penned an insightful essay exploring the entanglements of big tech – specifically, Microsoft – with the Zionist settler colonial state of Israel which readers of this blog are invited to check out.)

From a Counter-Racist perspective, this is an important work – perhaps one which makes for essential reading given the terrain – and in what follows I should like to share some brief extracts. (An interview with Katz is available at the Black Agenda Report, and an earlier essay from 2017, “Manufacturing an Artificial Intelligence Revolution”, engaging with some of the themes explored in the book is available here.)

AI isn’t an attempt at a “veridic” [that is, correct] account of human thought nor a technology for reproducing human thought in machines. AI is better seen as a mirror of the political projects of its practitioners and invested powers. (p.8)

To understand AI’s formation, trajectory, and function, I will argue that it should be viewed as a technology of whiteness: a tool that not only serves the aims of white supremacy but also reflects the form of whiteness as an ideology. AI takes the form of a makeshift patchwork; its nebulous and shifting character is used to serve a social order predicated on white supremacy. (p.9)

AI as a site where things that are useful to imperial aims are constructed. What the label picks out changes drastically, or is left undefined, but how it is served is remarkably stable: “AI” is that which can serve the American war machine, and what has served the war machine in the past can be “AI.” (p.52)

When AI suffers setbacks, new computing engines, when situated in an imperial frame, can help bring it back into the limelight. (p.55)

AI is a malleable technology of power. (p.68)

AI’s recent iteration has reinvigorated projects that were already in motion. (p.74)

AI’s persistent quest to order the world into ranked cultures, populations, and individuals. (p.101)

AI lacked a coherent basis in the same way that racial categories (such as “whiteness”) always have. (p.154)

There is no clearer testament to the whiteness of the AI expert industry than the gleeful appeal to slavery as the force that can save American society in the twenty-first century. (p.156)

DuBois thought whiteness was about ‘the ownership of the earth,’ but AI’s luminaries want the whole cosmos. (p.157)

To grasp whiteness … is not a matter of looking for its essence in any particular theory of race, but rather seeing how its ideological flexibility works to serve political interests. (p.161)

Whiteness as an ideology cannot be stably grounded in any specific racial account because whiteness is empty. (p.163)

Whiteness gets its significance, and its changing shape, only from the need to maintain relations of power. AI reproduces this quality of whiteness. (p.164)

As with the ideology of whiteness, AI had to be adapted to new social conditions and struggles against oppression. (p.166)

To challenge AI as a technology of whiteness means taking seriously how its nebulous and shifting character serves power. This entails not only challenging AI’s models of the self and their epistemic forgeries but also the legitimacy of the expert industry that gives the pursuit of AI its destructive powers and superficial coherence. Challenging, in other words, the institutions that sustain the endeavor. (p.172)

A disinvestment in whiteness would entail disinvesting in AI and its epistemic forgeries, as well as the expert industry and institutions that sustain it. (p.229)

Peace

On the ‘Special Place’ of – and threat posed by – the Muslim World

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

[T]he Muslim world occupies a special place in the Euro-Christian eschatological fantasy unleashed by the revelation of planetary immanence — it is not merely an object of that fantasy but also felt to be a competing subject with its own comparable fantasy. Due to [an] intense, intertwined history … Euro- Christian anti/imperialism is bound to see itself — and so must strain all the more not to see itself — in its Islamic counterpart. Call it the brother/other effect — discomfiture by the resemblance of the brother induces his projection as other only for that otherness then disconcertingly to retroject the self to the self. (p.267)

Extract taken from Jared Hickman’s “Globalization and the Gods: A Theory of Race and – or as – Modernity.” In Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery. Oxford: OUP, 2017.

Now consider this:

Lumping together the Saracen with the Jew or Cathar or, later, with an African animist or an Inca priest — as all ‘different’ and ‘inferior’ because they refused “the universal and rational message of Christianity” — may make a point against `European denigration of the other’ [yet] such an approach does little to elucidate the nature of power in Westem Christendom and the role of the image of the Saracen in articulating that power. In my view, the image of the Muslim alone was integral to the articulation of power in the Christian West. (p.571)

Extract taken from Mastnak, T. (2004). Book review of John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination, Speculum, 79(2), 568-571.

Peace

Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #123

Peace Be Unto Those Wo Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

[R]ace and computation are historical characters in the narrative of the West’s ongoing pursuit for personal existence and self-certainty. Race and computation are intimately linked to the telos of European reason. The following question could be posed: Why not provide a positive history of technology AND race in order to see where they may intersect? [Because this line of inquiry cannot] reveal the basis upon which the idea of race and computation are grounded, that is, the idea of personal existence. Personal existence is normative because it asserts that in order to be human one must be actively reasoning and be certain of doing so. The uniquely European idea of the self-sufficient person as a rational animal is where the modern invention of race and the later development of computation find their unlikely origin.

[T]wo centuries before the advent of the theory of computation, race was intrinsically aligned with the history of rational personal existence because race provided a mechanism to distinguish between beings with reason and those without.

[T]he computer as a model of mechanized reason is itself based upon the prior model of Man. In fact the ontological status of the computer preserves some of the basic characteristics of Man, in particular the idea of self certainty which is transformed into … computational certainty.

[O]nce cognition is determined as the basis of human existence, it not only colonizes
human-being all the way down, but through the prejudice of [Cartesian] extension, colonizes the world all the way out. Therefore the traditional prejudices that narrowly define the human as a closed off interiority also limit our understanding of how we interact with the world. Instead of the existential condition of being-in-the-world, the traditional prejudice asserts that we are minds inserted into a world of extended things. The “overdetermination” of cognition results in a totalizing colonization of being.

Extracts taken from Mahendran, D.D. (2011) Race and Computation: An Existential Phenomenological inquiry concerning Man, Mind, and the Body. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. University of California.

I suggest the need to put the above into conversation with recent developments in what some have referred to as ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff) and/or ‘data colonialism’ (Couldry and Mejias), but also into dialogue with (racialised) political theology as set out by Jared Hickman and others. In addition, there is a need to consider what follows from the distinction between intellect and rationality as ‘religion’ is allegedly eclipsed by racism; on the latter point, see the reference to the work of Ogunnaike in the previous blog post entitled The Decolonial Question Concerning Artificial Intelligence.

Peace

Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #122

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

Political theology is that philosophical, indeed that metaphysical, claim to the rightness, the purity, the would-be gravity of the state as the telos of society, as the horizon of order, as what securitizes the world if not life itself. If this order, which is to say state order, is the ontological horizon of what holds us, if it is a fgure of the Being that holds beings (most especially the human mode of being, which within the terms of state order is nothing less than the citizen mode of being, the being that is homo politicus), then political theology is the discourse of Being in its projection of the state as the ground of legitimate, political (as opposed to “nonpolitical” or ante-political or anarchic) assembly, on the one hand, and as the ground of juridical subjecthood, on the other.

I would like to put a finer point on the problem of political theology by approaching it in terms of the problem of the evisceration of the sacred, or that which hovers “beyond” state-sanctioned horizons of life or what is truly real, what moves as invisibly felt or as a surging, surreal presence that state operations work hard to overshadow in monumentalizing itself, often through monuments. Like a kind of astrophysical dark matter with the unknowable force of a dark energy that exceeds racial capitalism’s gravitational pull by exerting a force from within and that exceeds this (racial) world’s epistemological and material circumscriptions, this surging, surreal presence moves at the limit of the state even if on some level within its constraints … Political theology is a [statist] discourse that seeks to eviscerate such an imagination of the sacred. (pp.170-171)

Extracts taken from “Other Worlds, Nowhere (or, The Sacred Otherwise)” by J. Kameron Carter. In Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness. Edited by Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro and Andrea Smith. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), pp.158-209.

Peace

Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #121

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

Neoclassical economic theory is an ideology originally developed in colonial Britain to justify and morally neutralize the exploitation of its extractive periphery. In its modern, neoliberal guise, it has championed ‘globalization’ as a modern euphemism for imperialism. The very concept of ‘technology’ is an indispensable component of this ideology. (p.9)

Extract taken from Hornborg, A. (2020) Machines as Manifestations of Global Systems: Steps Toward a Sociometabolic Ontology of Technology. Anthropological Theory: 1-22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499620959247

Peace

Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #120

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider the following:

Facing the future, the question isn’t what will be or how do we know what will be but instead the realization that whatever is done will be that on which the future will depend. Rejecting optimism and pessimism, there is a supervening alternative: political commitment.

Lewis Gordon, “Thoughts on Afropessimism”, Contemporary Political Theory (2017).

Peace

Grazing on Information

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

I’m currently reading a short essay entitled “Informatics of the Oppressed” by Rodrigo Ochigame.

Early in the essay he states the following:

No word captures the dominant form of information consumption on the internet more aptly than “feed”—a ubiquitous term derived from an agrarian metaphor. As in animal husbandry, your information diet is engineered to maximize the yield of a business operation.

From an Islamic Counter-Racist perspective, I was immediately struck by the resonance the above statement has with the following sign/indicator (ayat) in The Qur’an [=The Final Proclamation of God/Allah to Humanity]:

(47:12) Indeed, God/Allah will admit those who are securely committed (to Him) and have acted in a way to promote health (and repair) to gardens beneath which rivers flow, but those who reject (conceal, and are ungrateful) enjoy themselves and eat as grazing livestock eat, and the Fire will be a residence for them.

Peace

On the Necropolitics of Ethical AI

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

No defensible claim to “ethics” can sidestep the urgency of legally enforceable restrictions to the deployment of technologies of mass surveillance and systemic violence. Until such restrictions exist, moral and political deliberation about computing will remain subsidiary to the profit-making imperative expressed by the Media Lab’s motto, “Deploy or Die.” While some deploy, even if ostensibly“ethically,” others die.

Extract taken from THE INVENTION OF “ETHICAL AI”: How Big Tech Manipulates Academia to Avoid Regulation by Rodrigo Ochigame, The Intercept, 20 December 2019.

Peace

A Non-Aligned Ghost in The Machine

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

The ghost of the post-Bandung (1955) Non-Aligned Movement comes to haunt ‘The Machine’ (or at least, The Machine’s machines):

Let’s see where this goes, if anywhere.

Peace