Joining the dance: ecology, AI and minimum shared frameworks?

[Summary: Fragments of reflection on the Decarbonisation and Decolonisation of AI]

I’ve spent some time this morning reading the ‘AI Decolonial Manyfesto’ which opens framed as “a question, an opening, a dance about a future of AI technologies that is decolonial”. Drawing on the insights, positions and perspectives of a fantastic collective authorship, it provides some powerful challenges for thinking about how to shape the future applications of AI (and wider data) technologies.

As I’ve been reading the Manyfesto on Decolonialisation in a short break from working on a project about Decabonisation – and the use of data and AI to mitigate and adapt to the pressing risks of climate breakdown, I find myself particularly reflecting on two lines:

“We do not seek consensus: we value human difference. We reject the idea that any one framework could rule globally.”

and

“Decolonial governance will recognize, in a way that Western-centric governance structures historically have not, how our destinies are intertwined. We owe each other our mutual futures.”

Discussions over the role of data in addressing the global climate crisis may veer towards proposing vast centralising data (and AI) frameworks (or infrastructures), in order to monitor, measure and manage low-carbon transitions. Yet – such centralising data infrastructures risk becoming part of systems that perpetuates historical marginalisation, rather than tools to address systemic injustice: and they risk further sidelining important other forms of knowledge that may be essential to navigate our shared future on a changing planet.

I’m drawn to thinking about the question of ‘minimum shared frameworks’ that may be needed both in national and global contexts to address the particular global challenge of the climate in which all our destines are intertwined. Yet, whilst I can imagine decentralised, (even decolonised?), systems of data capture, sharing and use in order to help accelerate a low-carbon transitions, I’m struggling at first-look to see how those might be brought into being at the pace required by the climate crisis.

Perhaps my focus for that should be on later lines of the Manyfesto:

“We seek to center the engineering, design, knowledge-production, and dispute-resolution practices of diverse cultures, which are embedded with their own value systems.”

My own cultural context, social role, academic training and temperament leaves me profoundly uncomfortable ending a piece of writing without a conclusion – even if a conclusion would be premature (one of the particular structures of the ‘Western male, white’ thought that perhaps does much harm). But, I suspect that here I need to simply take first steps into the dance, and to be more attuned to the way it flows…