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

Islamic Counter Racist Thought Food #106

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

[R]ather than seeing surveillance as something inaugurated by new technologies … to see it as ongoing is to insist that we factor in how racism and antiblackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of our present order. (pp.8-9)

Extract taken from Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

Peace

Surveillance (Colonialism) as (White) Salvation

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

At a TED 2019 conference in Vancouver, Canada, Oxford Philosopher Nick Bostrom posited that humanity could destroy itself using a technology of our own creation, thereby gesturing towards the issue of ‘existential risk’ (posed by killer robots, nuclear armageddon, biological warfare etc.)

On his view, one of the only ways to save ourselves from this doomsday scenario would be to institute global mass surveillance:

Under Bostrom’s vision of mass surveillance, humans would be monitored at all times via artificial intelligence, which would send information to “freedom centers” that work to save us from doom. To make this possible, he said, all humans would have to wear necklaces, or “freedom tags,” with multi-directional cameras. (SOURCE)

In this connection, I am reminded of the delusions – or rather, deceptions – of technological whiteness, and the following poem by Richard Brautigan which inspired an important documentary series of the same name by Adam Curtis:

Peace

Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #79

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

[C]ases of Google building military drones, Facebook watching us all, and Amazon making facial recognition software for the police, need to be understood not as aberrations. Rather, they are business as usual … surveillance and unnerving links to the military-industrial complex are not signs that the Internet has gone awry, but signs that the Internet is functioning as intended.

Extract taken from Zachary Loeb’s “All Watched Over By Machines”, a review of Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (PublicAffairs, 2018), which is available here.

Peace

Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #71

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

When we eliminate uncertainty, we forfeit the human replenishment that attaches to the challenge of asserting predictability in the face of an always-unknown future in favor of the blankness of perpetual compliance with someone else’s plan.

Extract taken from “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism” (2016) by Shoshana Zuboff.

Peace

Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #69

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

Because of the accessibility and durability of digital memory, information power not only shifts from the individual to some known transactional party, but to unknown others as well. This solidifies and deepens existing power differentials between the information rich and the information poor, and may even deny the latter their own conception of their past. Equally problematic, it creates a climate of self-censorship through the perception of panoptic control that constrains robust and open debate … not simply in the present but long into the future [emphasis added]. (p.112)

Extract taken from Mayer-Schönberger, V. (2009) delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

In this connection, see the following earlier blog post:

ECONOMICS: Colonising The Future – Refinement of WS/R

Peace

(White) Skynet Ebbeth Closer

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Check out the following two articles by Nafeez Ahmed Mossadeq on the links between Google, the CIA and the NSA:

How the CIA made Google: Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet – Part 1

Why Google made the NSA: Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet – Part 2

Peace