The AI-development Connection - A View from the South

Abstract

The socialisation of Artificial Intelligence and the reality of an intelligence economy mark an epochal moment. The impacts of AI are now systemic - restructuring economic organisation and value chains, public sphere architectures and sociality. These shifts carry deep geo-political implications, reinforcing historical exclusions and power relations and disrupting the norms and rules that hold ideas of equality and justice together. At the centre of this rapid change is the intelligent corporation and its obsessive pursuit of data. Directly impinging on bodies and places, the de facto rules forged by the intelligent corporation are disenfranchising the already marginal subjects of development. Using trade deals to liberalise data flows, tighten trade secret rules and enclose AI-based innovation, Big Tech and their political masters have effectively taken away the economic and political autonomy of states in the global south. Big Tech's impunity extends to a brazen exploitation - enslaving labour through data over-reach and violating female bodies to universalise data markets. Thinking through the governance of AI needs new frameworks that can grapple with the fraught questions of data sovereignty, economic democracy, and institutional ethics in a global world with local aspirations. Any effort towards norm development in this domain will need to see the geo-economics of digital intelligence and the geo-politics of development ideologies as two sides of the same coin.