Artificial intelligence is creating a new colonial world order
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Artificial intelligence is creating a new colonial world order
The AI industry does not seek to capture land as the conquistadors of the Caribbean and Latin America did, but the same desire for profit drives it to expand its reach. The more users a company can acquire for its products, the more subjects it can have for its algorithms, and the more resources—data—it can harvest from their activities, their movements, and even their bodies.
Neither does the industry still exploit labor through mass-scale slavery, which necessitated the propagation of racist beliefs that dehumanized entire populations. But it has developed new ways of exploiting cheap and precarious labor, often in the Global South, shaped by implicit ideas that such populations don’t need—or are less deserving of—livable wages and economic stability.
Together, the stories reveal how AI is impoverishing the communities and countries that don’t have a say in its development—the same communities and countries already impoverished by former colonial empires. They also suggest how AI could be so much more—a way for the historically dispossessed to reassert their culture, their voice, and their right to determine their own future.
South Africa’s private surveillance machine is fueling a digital apartheid
At a monitoring station in the first row, the alerts appear one by one on a security worker’s screen. In one a man’s been flagged for running, in another a woman for standing in the hall while texting, in a third a woman for walking too close to a car. The operator reviews each one and clicks a “Dismiss” button on all of them. There’s also a comment box and a button marked “Escalate.”
...Vumacam partnered with the Chinese company Hikvision and the Swedish company Axis Communications to provide the hardware while iSentry and Milestone, a popular Denmark-based video surveillance management tool, provided the software. From there, it teamed up with private agencies patrolling wealthier residential areas and erected poles with high-definition cameras where they wanted on top of Johannesburg’s fiber network.
...Indeed, South Africa is in the process of building out a national biometric identification database called ABIS that would include the face of every resident and foreign visitor. Combined with camera upgrades to Vumacam’s nationwide surveillance network and expanded use of facial recognition, ABIS could one day enable the government to track the movements of everyone in the country.