AI: No Savior for the Global South
Dear Reader,
Some years ago, in response to investor questions about his planned business model, Open AI founder, Sam Altman, famously replied that he intended to build an extremely intelligent AI, and then just ask it how to make money. The irony, today, is that AI-managed exchange-traded funds are largely staying away from investing in surging GenAI stocks. As one commentator quipped, “‘Ehh, I’m an artificial intelligence and I’m not that great, I’m gonna fade this trend,’ the very self-aware AI might be saying.”
Jokes aside, GenAI still continues to dominate the news cycle and how! But before we get into it, a quick overview of recent developments in the Big Tech space.
This month, the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) landmark antitrust case against Google for its monopoly over online search went to trial. Significantly, the DOJ’s opening arguments have emphasized the role of data power in enabling this monopolization. A highly watched trial that takes on one of the most enduring monopolies of the platform era, its outcome is being touted as a litmus test for the ability of competition measures – not just in the US, but worldwide – to rein in Big Tech corporations.
The city of New York came down heavily on Airbnb, outlining a new local law that brings in a much higher accountability and compliance threshold for operators. This has been the latest victory in a wave of proposed and enacted regulation that is actively pushing back against how platforms operate on ground, with local pockets of success where national regulation may falter.
As lawmakers in the EU move to debate the landmark Platform Directive legislation, Uber has been lobbying vigorously to neutralize the law, with the usual threats of exiting hundreds of cities across the continent if the Directive passes in its current form. Meanwhile, auto workers in the US have gone on strike, with automation and job loss concerns from the transition to EV cars and AI high on their agenda.
On the global governance front, we are seeing different blocs laying out pathways and visions for digitalization. In the final G20 meetings held this month, India announced a series of measures around digital public infrastructures, seeking to expand the economic potential of these technologies to new parts of the developing world. Aspects of the announcement are definitely promising, but must be read against the backdrop of growing geopolitical competition on these issues, and potential for tension amongst existing global blocs. The recent expansion of BRICS, for instance, signaled a clear move by the likes of China and Brazil to make it a more central global body and to cease dependence on US infrastructure like the SWIFT electronic payment system. Similarly, the G7’s recent agreement to a common code of conduct on AI reveals a gambit to take the lead in shaping the future of AI governance. How these rival multilateral trajectories compete for influence on digital policy will be important to track going forward.
Circling back to the AI question, ChatGPT traffic continued its downward slide for the third month in a row, and new research claimed that the Large-Language-Model had actually started to perform worse on certain tasks over time because of the re-programming it undertook in response to interaction with the general public. Moreover, recent polls also revealed that there is growing distrust amongst people about how corporations are using AI and whether they will do it in a responsible manner.
This month on DataSyn, as we continue to focus on AI, we delve into the promises and limitations of this ostensibly epoch-defining technology. Our first piece takes up the claims of AI as a tool for development in regions like Africa and assesses the wider problems that attend to such a vision. Our second piece challenges the prevailing obscurantism around AI and how it works, arguing that a careful demystification of the technology is a necessary first step in anchoring our ethical and political thinking around it.
Additionally, our bonus third feature tracks recent developments in the digitalization of agriculture, and the complex politics around the datasets that are generated from our food systems.
The DataSyn Team
THE BIG EXCESS
AI is Africa’s New Growth Mantra, but Can it Fix Development?
Yousif Hassan
Can the entrenched structural problems of Africa really be overcome by the emergent ‘AI-for-Development’ rhetoric? Yousif Hassan provides a sobering analysis of these questions and asks whether adopting technological solutions in haste may not pose more dangers than opportunities.
Read on.
THE NEW DIVERGENCE
Dethroning the All-powerful AI: Developing Ethics for a Demystified AI
Quito Tsui
Reorienting discussions around AI and how we can shape its future trajectories is often challenged by prevalent obfuscation about how it works, how it is built, where it fails and so forth. Challenging the deliberate mystification and hallowed status of this technology, Quito Tsui articulates how a critical ‘demystification’ can anchor our engagement with ethical and political questions about the use of AI.
Read on.
THE POLICY TABLE
Feeding the World with More Data?
Maywa Montenegro & Matthew Canfield
The capitalist paradigm of agricultural productivism has resulted in disastrous consequences for human health and the environment. But as widespread calls for food system transformation converge with big data and AI, a new fixation on producing copious data could undermine prospects for real change. Maywa Montenegro & Matthew Canfield investigate the contours of these emerging challenges.
Read on.
The Sins & Synergies Lounge
A recurring theme in recent AI commentary is the potential of open-source AI initiatives. Yet, what exactly constitutes ‘open’ AI? And what are the limitations to this vision in an extremely concentrated technological landscape? Check out this journal article by Sarah West, David Widder and Meredith Whittaker to learn more.
Given the sheer scale of today’s Big Tech giants, many believe that ‘tech’ and its products are uniquely dynamic and disruptive. However, the history of antitrust regulation provides a more nuanced explanation as to how these companies got so big. Read this Wired piece by Cory Doctorow where he builds on such an alternative framing of the origins of tech power.
The impulse to integrate AI technology into weapons systems is being accelerated by growing geo-political competition between the US and China. Read this Reuters special report by David Lauge to get a sense of the dangerous inventions potentially lurking on the horizon.
As the criticism starts to heat up around problems with contemporary LLMs, it may be worth revisiting how people have critically engaged with Chatbots from their inception many decades ago. Tune in to this episode of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, where Ben Tarnoff discusses the historical ark of AI critique.
As digital technology becomes a bigger part of urban infrastructure, vast new datasets are set to become trapped in the vicious cycles of appropriation and capture. What would an alternative vision for the use of this data look like? Join Renata Avila and Guy Weress as they chart the idea of a ‘City Data Commons’ in this essay, part of IT for Change’s ‘Unskewing the Data Value Chain’ project.
Post-script
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