Paola Ricaurte Quijano

In this talk by Paola Ricaurte Quijano, she addresses the theme of "AI Ethics for the Majority World: The Question of Violence at Scale." She begins by discussing coloniality and modernity, emphasizing the interconnectedness of colonialism, capitalism, and the patriarchal order, which have led to systems of violence. The destructivist logic of colonialism is linked to the development of capitalism, and the racial superiority of colonizers has been used to legitimize dispossession and epistemic dominance.

Ricaurte Quijano connects modernity to a Western model of the world, highlighting how globalization and narratives of universal modernity have driven extractivism on a global scale. She critiques representations and metaphors that contribute to the inferiority of the Global South and underscores the unequal distribution of knowledge production, language validity, and institutional power.

Moving to the discussion of AI ethics, she notes that debates often center around Western societies and international organizations influenced by industrialized nations. Ricaurte Quijano argues that AI, as a social-technical system, is a matter of power, emphasizing that racialization is inherent in the development and deployment of technologies. She introduces the concept of "hegemonic AI" as a tool consolidating a capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal world model.

The speaker raises concerns about AI being used to automate inequality and oppression, not only through biased algorithms but also by contributing to environmental destruction. She criticizes the concentration of the digital economy in specific regions, deepening global economic inequalities. Ricaurte Quijano stresses the need to view AI's impact within a broader context, considering its effects on territories, resources, and marginalized communities.

The speaker calls for a reframing of the AI discussion beyond bias, connecting geopolitics with body politics. She highlights the environmental impact of AI, including resource consumption, pollution, and the displacement of communities. Ricaurte Quijano introduces the concept of "Tequio," inspired by indigenous practices, advocating for technologies that prioritize dignity, sustainability, and participation.

In conclusion, Ricaurte Quijano calls for a critical ethics that considers the multidimensional impacts of AI on the majority world, emphasizing the need for an ethics of existence that takes responsibility for the damage and impact on the planet's life.

Hi, good morning, good afternoon, good night. It's very early, so I don't guarantee I will be coherent and in normal conditions my English is not that good. So now I'll try to do my best. So my my talk, I'll try to be brief as well. My talk is it's called AI, ethics for the Majority World. The question of violence at scale. And we use the term majority world instead of the global South. So I'll try to speak about four topics. What's coloniality and modernity, the coloniality of technology and data. I work first, I work from the framework of the colonial feminism, so everything it's related to that. And then a section about AI ethics for the majority war and the last session about technologies. And of course I will explain what this means. So I like to begin with these three big systems of violence, which are colonialism, capitalism, the patriarchal order. And we know that these systems of violence are interconnected. That's what we have learned from feminist theorists of color. So colonialism implies destructivism and the process of extracting our first resources. And then we'll see data and other goods. It's aimed at causing this possession of the peoples and territories where the colonial powers are settled. So the destructivist logic of the colonial period, let me just one second. Apologies. Destructivist logic of the colonial period is linked to the development of colonialism 1st But second, colonialism is required to develop capitalism and also is associated with other configurations of modernity, and its various modes of violence are associated with different spheres. This is a quotation from Durantic, Kroger, and Laffer. So the colony. The colony marked the beginning of the contemporary Structivist process in the territory that we call Abiayala, or the Americas. This process was legitimized by the racial superiority of the colonizers, which in turn translated into epistemic dominance. So racial superiority legitimized dispossession, structivism, dispossession, but also implied that racial superiority was used as a pretext to legitimize epistemic dominance. So globalization as a narrative of the universal character of modernity drove extractivism at scale. And modernity is constructed as a macro narrative of the Western model of the world, which is imposed as a universal model through various mechanisms. And these mechanisms are, for example, the construction of images and representations of the world that reinforce the idea of the greatness of the North. So here we have the Mercator projection, the map that we usually use to represent the globe. And we can see also the Gold Peters projection we see which is a better representation of the size of the regions in the world, the size of the continents. And you can clearly see that Africa is huge, Latin America is huge. But in the first map we have a misrepresentation of these geographical spaces. And here I put a map where you can see like the size of Mexico, Mexico is a big country. But usually we don't have the ideas of the real size of the countries of the world. So modernity is the becomes the desirable outcome of a society and rural non urban societies are considered not modern or uncivilized civil science. We also have metaphors that contribute to the inferiority of to this idea of the priority of the South. For example, in English there is an expression that says go South, so it means to deteriorate or decline. But we do not only have images, representations or metaphors. We also have, as I said, construction of what knowledge is valid and what knowledge is not valid. So for example, academic knowledge and the criteria to define what knowledge is, it's valid. For example, scientific knowledge, it's valid versus other types of knowledge that are not valid is concentrated in a few countries in the world you can see. I don't know, it's very small, but the first rectangle is the United States and the second one is United Kingdom. And also the languages that were valid well were also defined. In this case, the language of science, which is English and also the language of being considered scientific or an academic is English. If you don't speak in English or if you don't write in English, you simply don't exist. So the blue rectangle is English, whereas the red one is Spanish, for example. We also have institutions and here we have the the main institutions or the main universities, institutions of knowledge production. We have the top 400 universities and if you see the red line is the equator and of course the the numbers are of the universities that are above the equator are many. It's it's it's we have great numbers and below the equator we only have a few universities, mainly situated in Australia for example, and in Latin America we only have two universities below the equator and one in university. Up of the equator we also have systems or ideas of how society should be, and in this case the term. It's not only a term, but it's also a model of development. Development as an idea of how societies should move forward is associated with economic growth and unlimited consumption. So we have in turn wealth and economic success as fundamental values, despite this is causing the destruction of the planet. And also we have this idea of rich countries versus poor countries. But again, there is no reference to the process of colonization and dispossession that was and is the basis of their wealth, for example, we can have a different narrative. So these countries, which are considered REACH, also are responsible for the emission of the most the biggest numbers of carbon emissions in the world. For example, North America concentrates 70, almost 75,000,000 tons of of carbon emissions, Europe of 50 million, Central and South America together 11,000,000. So the carbon emissions of the richest 1% are more than double those of the poorest health of the world. So this idea of richness and well is also associated with a limited consumption, as I said, but also with illustration of the planet. So here we can see for example the average carbon emissions in the global scale and we can again contrast, compare and contrast these two maps, the maps of wealth, the map of wealth and this map of carbon emissions. And we can see the countries that are considered poor have less responsibility in producing carbon emissions. So industrialized nations unlimited model of consumption. This idea of wealth and and unlimited growth and and economic development is also associated with the destruction of the planet. And there is a Mexican mihe activist. She says that this, this is a myth. This idea of development is a myth because this idea of development is taking us to the structure of of the earth. So she says, ecosystems became goods, people, more consumers. So the myth turned the world into a place increasingly in hospital to human life. So I said at the beginning that I work from the decolonial and feminist framework, and I will try to connect this idea of the idea of modernity and development with the idea of developing technologies. Because to expand the frontiers of extractivism and to make it a more complex and pervasive process, you need technologies. So in order to grab all the spheres that are essential for staying alive, we need to develop technologies and Fast forward. We are in the current moment of history and we hear like different ways of referring to this moment, like platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, digital colonialism or data colonialism. And. And what I would like to emphasize or highlight is that of course we'll live in a moment in which everything is increasingly mediated by a computational rationality or and data rationality that goes. But it's it's aimed at automating society. And this author called Steeler spoke about the idea of automating society, implying that we are automating our forms of existence. But for me, it's important to emphasize that capitalism is always racial. So this idea of development and modernity and developing also technologies is always tied to racialization. So racialization is a technology of power that legitimizes the suffocation and oppression of some people and nations over others in the modern global economy. Global racial capitalism is materialized for economic, political, social, cultural, social, technical and knowledge systems at global and local levels. So the decolonial framework. For me it's useful because because it allows us to understand the Nexus between knowledge, power and being, which sustains an endless war against against specific bodies, knowledge, cultures, peoples and territories. So now we are the globe is concerned about the development of AI. But usually these debates around AI ethics are centered in Western societies and also LED by international organizations that are also influenced by these industrialized nations and nations that develop these technologies. So in this context, how can we address the ethical challenges of AI? And first of all, of course, as every social technical system, AI is a matter of power. So we have people that have the control of the development and the deployment of AI, whereas others are the users or the people that are receiving the impacts and the harm of the deployment of these systems. So I tried to explain that this is not only a social technical process, but also an epistemic process in which datification, other aviation and automation are working together to expand this process of epistemic dominance, but also of social injustice. So for me, hegemonic AI. So the AI that is popularized and used by for many people around the world is a necrotechnopolitical tool that helps consolidate A capitalist, colonial and patriarchal world model through these epistemic processes. But these in turn generate orders of global classification, global orders of classification that lead to the epistemic, economic, social, cultural and environmental inequality. So if we have the map of the digital economy, we can see that this map is highly concentrated in certain regions of the world, and also that this digital economy in reality is deepening the economic the wealth gap among regions and among countries. So AI is used to automate inequality, to automate operation by several mechanisms. And one of the things that concerns me the most is that we usually speak about AI in terms of bias, bias. But if we reframe the discussion about AI as a tool of of power, as a matter of power, we have to see the whole picture. Not only the AI pipeline in in particular, but how does the this AI pipeline is inserted in a in a social ecosystem where there are relations that are defined norms, values, institutions that are created and practices that reinforce the idea of having certain technologies to mediate our relation to the world and our relationship between ourselves. So for me it's important to to connect this geopolitics with the body politics. The idea of that that AI is causing harm not only with the deployment, with biases and and everything with, but also causing harm to the territory. Because these technologies require a lot of natural resources, they require energy and they require water to be to to be developed. So we have this model of unlimited consumption and maximization of profit. These technologies need mineral destruction but are based on unfair labor and OPEC supply supply chains. A lot of energy to train machine learning models, a lot of water to keep data centers working. And of course, never we never speak about technological dumps that are usually based in countries of the Global South. So who's bearing the cost of this technological development? We have territorial occupation. We have water, land, air, pollution. We have the displacement of communities. We have labor exploitation and many, many other consequences of the development of AI that are never addressed when we speak about these technologies. So for me these processes that are connected, as as I said, these epistemic processes associated with the deployment of AI are associated not only with epistemic inequality but with social and and of course environmental inequality and are causing physical death of people. So I have some images. This is an image against a data center that was going to build in Chile. And I have only one minute to speak about tequiologies. And this is a category developed after the word Tequio, which in in Mexico is a practice of the indigenous communities and which is also practiced in other regions of of Latin America with different names such as Mingo or material. And Tequio is a practice that refers to command or to achieve a goal. So this activist, this mihe activist from Oaxaca, Yasnaya Aguilar, she says that we need technologies that are like Teqios, that are technologies for all, technologies in which we can all participate, technologies that are that emphasize living with dignity and not competition or the OR the impact or or heavily impacting the environment. So she says that it would if we listen experience to of the indigenous peoples of of Abiyallah, probably we will learn that there are different ways or or alternative ways to develop technologies. So as a conclusion, just say that we need a critical ethics that takes into account the multidimensional impacts on the majority world of the planet and ethics of existence that assumes core responsibility for the damage and impact of undiviability of life. And that's it. Thank you.