Adrianna Tan
AI is fundamentally about colonialism.
At its roots, what makes GenAI work is currency and hourly wage arbitrage. Pay data workers in Africa and Asia very low amounts of money to basically put the raw materials together.
There’s no surprise why @timnitGebru, @abebab and others have called this a form of algorithmic or data colonialism.
Adrianna Tan
Before I was an AI ethicist and software product manager, I was first the product of a post colonial society and a scholar of post colonial and independence histories of SE Asia.
A theme that comes up often across the board with ‘why colonialism eventually failed’:
1. When we were attacked by others (like Japan), the European colonial forces showed weakness and this destroyed the myth that they could not be defeated
2. When our independence leaders went to the colonial powers to study, they saw, for the first time, Europeans not in positions of power, and started to see that they didn’t always have to kneel
Sashin
@skinnylatte I don't think I fully understand 2 here
Adrianna Tan
@sashin they didn’t know until they got to England that there could be white people who would shine their shoes.
This created a sense of ‘why should I put up with whatever back home?’
Adrianna Tan
Another common theme that comes up in SE Asian decolonial and postcolonial studies is, very often after independence, independence leaders simply took over oppressive structures and localized it.
Adrianna Tan
Thinking about all these today as I think about genAI broadly.
AI and ML in their academic forms are not ‘bad’. They are like ‘it’s not bad to sometimes sell a bunch of spices that you happened to get from the Moluccas’.
GenAI is ‘let’s form VOC and EIC and conquer all the brown people and extract as much from the spice islands as we can. Who cares if we also kill thousands of people?’
Adrianna Tan
I think also how, after Feb 2025’s Paris AI safety summit, it looks like the world has given up on AI safety and has decided to splinter into many different sovereign models all doing their own thing. Coz the leading colonials (OpenAI etc) suck and can’t be trusted. But that they’ll fundamentally end up doing similar things to what postcolonial leaders did. Inherit the basic structure of oppression, install ‘local’ leaders, and call it a win.
Adrianna Tan
And Microsoft now selling OpenAI to governments of emerging markets around the world is just like the colonial powers selling back finished goods, like rum, or opium, back to the plantation and people who tilled the land. Getting people addicted on things they were paid poorly to create, while someone else profits.
There is truly nothing new under the sun, especially when it comes to imperialism.
Ninad Pundalik
@skinnylatte thought provoking, indeed, for someone who labors for bay area gains from the confines of a Desi home, and what it means for my society at large. This will change my mind eventually, dunno how/when
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