IA decolonial: uma perspectiva sobre a busca colonizadora de mão de obra aplicada no desenvolvimento da inteligência artificial por estados imperialistas

The Battle Rages On

Reviewed by: AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines ed. by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon Ronald R. Kline (bio) AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines Edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 424. The strength of this edited volume, which grew out of a series of interdisciplinary workshops organized by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and the Royal Society of London, lies in its comprehensiveness. The book's twenty contributors, representing a wide range of disciplines, mostly in the humanities, consider an impressive spectrum of technologies and time periods. Part 1 ("Antiquity to Modernity") covers clockwork, self-regulated automata, and early robots in Europe from Ancient Greece to the industrial revolutions of [End Page 223] the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part 2 ("Modern and Contemporary") focuses on the electronic computer systems, including neural-net machine learning, that came to be known as "artificial intelligence" in the United States and Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The variety of narratives is equally impressive. Part 1 deals with a wide range of texts, from Homeric epics to books on natural magic and experimental science in the Renaissance and early modern period, and from Victorian fiction to Karel Čapek's classic play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered in 1921. Part 2, organized by themes, focuses on the rise of modern science fiction in books, films, and television, often contrasting that with futuristic predictions, both utopian and critical, made by AI practitioners. AI Narratives thus resembles a scholarly handbook that summarizes recent work in a new field of study. As with most handbooks, its strength of being comprehensive contributes to its weakness of not presenting a unifying argument or perspective about these narratives. The history and sociology of science and technology is represented in the volume by references to such well-known scholars as Jessica Riskin, Simon Schaffer, David F. Noble, N. Katherine Hayles, Judy Wajcman, and Sheila Jasanoff. But the omissions are notable too, such as Adelheid Voskuhl on automata and fiction in eighteenth-century Europe and Donna Haraway on cyborgs. Although the editors state that the "work of this book contributes to establishing the importance of narratives as constituent parts of any sociotechnical imaginary" (p. 7), a concept introduced by Jasanoff, none of the authors engage with this concept, nor with historian of technology David Nye's influential work on technological narratives. In part 2, I would have liked to have heard more about the relationship between the writers of science fiction and AI researchers. Beth Singler mentions this mutual influence in her nice chapter on AI, anthropomorphism, and the parent-child narrative. But the fact that Marvin Minsky, a founder of computer-based AI, was a consultant to the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), or that John W. Campbell Jr., the editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, corresponded with his former MIT professor Norbert Wiener, a founder of cybernetics who is cited several times in AI Narratives, suggests that much more could be done to explore the permeable boundary between the creators of science fiction and the inventors of AI systems in the twentieth century. All of the chapters are well researched, well argued, and informative, whether they recount a recent book by the author or present new research. An idea of the richness of the topics and themes can be seen from the titles of some outstanding chapters. These include Minsoo Kang and Ben Halliburton's "The Android of Albertus Magnus: A Legend of Artificial Being," Julie Park's "Making the Automaton Speak: Hearing Artificial Voices in the Eighteenth Century," Kanta Dihal's "Enslaved Minds: Artificial Intelligence, Slavery, and Revolt," and Anna McFarlane's "AI and Cyberpunk Networks." [End Page 224] These virtues make AI Narratives a path-breaking book that surveys the important place of narrative in the long history of the interaction between humans and intelligent machines in Europe and the United States. Ronald R. Kline Ronald R. Kline is Bovay Professor of History and Ethics of Engineering, Emeritus, at Cornell University. He...

An African voice is not prominent in most areas of scholarship, including the study of language, despite the richness of the linguistic heritage of Africa. Several factors contribute to this situation, including the way formal education came into being during and after the colonial era, but also resource constraints since then. While ostensibly enabling developments, the movement towards open access publishing and writing assistance from artificial intelligence have consequences that will prevent the development of an authentic African voice. Open access publishing alleviates access to scholarship but does not amplify African voices in equal measure because of the cost of open access publishing for authors and African universities. Artificial intelligence is modelled on training data that contains many biases, not least of which the absence of African voices in the training data, which will supply authors using such tools with the voice of somebody else. In order to overcome the challenges to the development and amplification of an African voice, this article reviews the decolonisation debate and the fleeting literary and cultural movement called “rediscovery of the ordinary” during the final years of apartheid South Africa for inspiration to forge a new path. It emerges that a focus on authentic intellectual and real-world problems from the African context has to be the point of departure, rather than the attempt to seek alignment with currently favoured research concerns from the Global North. Furthermore, much existing scholarship is not favourable to an African voice but may nevertheless contain some elements of value, forcing African scholars to assess scholarship critically without rejecting outright what has been published within other scholarly traditions. A dedicated attempt to read and engage with African scholarship is required as part of this endeavour, amplifying other African voices as one cultivates and strengthens one’s own African voice.

Slavery as a social phenomenon has a centuries-old history, transforming and adapting to different eras and social conditions. In ancient times, it manifested in the form of physical subjugation and forced labour. During the Middle Ages, it took on an economic and feudal character, and in the era of colonialism, it became institutionalised. However, modern technological changes have led to the formation of new forms of dependence, which can be referred to as digital slavery. While slavery was previously associated with physical shackles, today it manifests as economic dependence, data manipulation and technological control. The aim of this article is to analyse the evolution of slavery from antiquity to the digital era, identify and evaluate new forms of digital slavery in modern society, and explore how technology and artificial intelligence are shaping a new system of subjugation. Special attention is given to the impact of digital slavery on Latvian society. The study employs the following methods: Historical–analytical method—to study the evolution of slavery; Philosophical analysis—to conceptualise the notions of freedom and dependence; Comparative method—to compare traditional and digital slavery; Contextual method—to analyse the impact of digital slavery on Latvian society. Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Digital slavery; Philosophy of slavery; Slavery.

This paper argues that the early modern period was already debating questions about the interstices and transitions between humans and machines, much like the ones that govern our engagements with AI today. Looking at Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I will be showing that, next to the ghost, Horatio is another and arguably no less challenging uncanny character on the battlements at Elsinore. While the ghost is situated between the full humanity of a living human being and the inanimate materiality of a dead corpse, Horatio seems to be situated between the full humanity of being “passion’s slave” and the mechanical functioning of a time-keeping and recording device. Horatio, then, is an experiment in artificial intelligence avant la lettre. This paper shows how his reduced, partial, and artificial humanity is explored by the play as it exposes Horatio’s inadequacies.

This chapter aims to conceptualize e-learning and artificial intelligence as a progression in the geo-historical process of university evolution and expansion in an increasingly globalizing world. Perkin identified five historical periods in university growth: the emergence of the medieval universities and their spread in the feudal order, the demands posed to universities by nation-states and the Enlightenment during the early modern period, the impact of the political and industrial revolutions, and the crisis of mass higher education since 1918. This chapter adds a sixth digital technologies: the role of artificial intelligence and cloud applications. Knowing and reflecting on the history of higher education is essential. Why universities emerged in societies and how they spread globally is relevant to understanding contemporary challenges facing higher education. To this end, the first locations, purposes, organizational structures, and legal frameworks are discussed.

This response to Joshua Reichard’s essay focuses on his references to Jacques Ellul’s technique which uses dialectic on two parallel levels: sociological and theological. Ellul argues that technique long predated the Industrial Age, and began in the earliest cities, though it was only incidental to society’s power centers from the ancient through early modern eras. Only in the modern age has technique come to a position of dominance where some see it as a possible threat to humanity due to dystopian elements such as artificial intelligence. This essay explores Ellul’s frequent references to both utopias and dystopias. By the 1950s, utopias were said to have ushered in totalitarianism. Dystopias were popular because they decried utopias as being out of touch with reality and thus dangerous to society. Ellul’s strong Christian faith provided answers to his concerns about the direction of human history, including technique. Though the twentieth-century dystopian totalitarian systems threatened humanity by utilizing technology for maximum repression over populations, they like prior systems may eventually dissipate and be replaced.

Our final epoch is the one that we currently occupy. Although this spans the period from the 1980s to the present day, historians may eventually differentiate between the early Digital Age—running from the advent of the Personal Computer (PC) in 1981, to about 2015—and a post-Digital Age. In technological terms, the latter (or current) part of the Digital Age—what I am suggesting may eventually be recognised separately—is characterised by a new Industrial Revolution, and one that has been labelled Industry 4.0. The first Industrial Revolution is the one that we covered under the Age of Enlightenment. The second Industrial Revolution was characterised by mass production, assembly lines and electricity, and corresponds approximately to the late Romantic period, and early Modern Age. The third industrial revolution is defined by the rise of computers and automation—intersecting with the late Modern Age and early Digital Age—but the fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) represents the synthesis of data analytics, autonomous systems and artificial intelligence in what is termed cyber-physical systems.

The essay proposes a ‘literary’ perspective on the history of artificial intelligence. On the one hand, this means a literary-historical retrospective of the decades since the Second World War, but it also emphasizes the basic probabilistic trait of artificial intelligence, which becomes recognizable especially against the background of current technological developments. The space of literature is the horizon of possibility that accompanies what is real for man in early modern times and to which his activity is directed. When ‘intelligent machines’ today turn to their environment in the mode of mathematical conjecture, this marks not only an epistemic, but also an anthropological caesura.

Playing on different notions of the virtual — the incomplete, the hyperreal, etc. — this essay looks critically at mediated discourses of multiculturalism across a variety of contemporary British texts (literature, film, news media, sociology, political memoir). After examining the historical background to multicultural policies in turn-of-the-cen-tury Britain, the essay assesses the ambivalent role multiculturalism plays in supporting social and cultural diversity within an increasingly dispersed political structure. Without dismissing the transformative potential of multiculturalism in Britain and, by extension, the ‘New Europe’, the essay argues that multiculturalism’s communitarian ideals continue to disguise a variety of social tensions: racial discrimination, even racist violence; inbuilt hierarchies of class and gender; the disparity between grandiose political ambitions and relatively modest constitutional reforms. Multiculturalism might be seen, in this last sense, as something of a test-case for a government increasingly accused of privileging style over substance, and of promoting a ‘New Britain’ in which established interests are protected, novelty jostles with nostalgia, and the millennial rhetoric of revolutionary change affords further evidence of the alliance between political opportunism and media spin.

ArgumentTalk of “reason” and “rationality” has been perennial in the philosophy and sciences of the European, Latin tradition since antiquity. But the use of these terms in the early-modern period has left especial marks on the specialties and disciplines that emerged as components of “science” in the modern world. By examining discussions by seventeenth-century philosophers, including natural philosophers such as Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes, the practical meanings of, specifically, inferential reasoning can be seen as reducing, for most, to intellectual processes deriving from foundations that required intuitional insight that was owing to God. Mechanical reasoning, or artificial intelligence, was a contradiction in terms for such as Pascal, whose views of his own arithmetical machine illustrate the issue well. Hobbes’ analysis of reason, however, replaced the ineffable authority of God with the authority of the civil power, to reveal the social reality of “reason” as nothing other than authorized judgment.

The paper explores the evolution of Internal Quality Control (IQC) in Sierra Leone's higher education institutions (HEIs) with a specific focus on the transformative role of Learning Management Systems (LMS). Beginning with the colonial era, the paper traces the historical context of IQC, emphasizing its informal nature. The post-independence expansion of HEIs introduced quality challenges compounded by economic constraints and political instability. The civil war further disrupted the education sector, and the reconstruction period saw the establishment of the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC), formalizing IQC processes. The introduction of LMS platforms, such as Moodle and Google Classroom, marked a pivotal shift in enhancing educational quality. LMS has significantly contributed to data-driven decision-making, standardized educational processes, and continuous feedback mechanisms. However, challenges remain, including infrastructural limitations and the urban-rural digital divide. The paper also projects the future of IQC, highlighting the potential integration of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and blockchain in LMS platforms. These advancements promise to revolutionize the educational experience, offering new possibilities for quality assurance and student engagement.

In early modernity, one can find many spatial logic diagrams whose geometric forms share a family resemblance with religious art and symbols. The family resemblance these diagrams bear in form is often based on a vesica piscis or on a cross: Both logic diagrams and spiritual symbols focus on the intersection or conjunction of two or more entities, e.g. subject and predicate, on the one hand, or god and man, on the other. This paper deals with the development and function of logic diagrams, their analogy to religious art and symbols, and their modern application in artificial intelligence.

Reviewed by: Information: A Historical Companion ed. by Ann Blair et al. Marc Kosciejew (bio) Information: A Historical Companion Edited by Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 904. In Information: A Historical Companion, historians Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton, as editors, situate the phenomenon of information at the center of historical focus. Illuminating the variegated ways in which information has shaped and been shaped by societies from antiquity to the present, they show how new kinds of information challenges—sociocultural, managerial, organizational, political, and economic—at different times and places often necessitated new approaches to, technologies for, and understandings of, information. Compiling interdisciplinary contributions from distinguished historians and theorists, the book outlines a continuous, information-focused historical landscape and narrative of this complex phenomenon. The scale and scope of coverage is ambitious. The sociocultural settings are global, and historical eras are extensive. The book covers the ancient Roman Empire; the medieval Islamic world; early modern East Asia and Europe; the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution; the British Empire and other nineteenth-century colonial powers; the two World Wars; twentieth-century globalization; and today's late-capitalist knowledge society. The technologies examined, meanwhile, are heterogeneous in kind and myriad in format, ranging from early writing tools and scrolls, codices, and books to more recent innovations, from computers and digital devices to algorithms and artificial intelligence. Moreover, the associated or required technological infrastructures enabling information creation, transmission, and storage presented are also broad, including postal services, telegraph cables, radios, televisions, computers, internet connections, and wireless communications. By tracing information's trajectory, this book is noteworthy for encapsulating the complex history of an already complicated phenomenon within the confines of one, albeit hefty, tome of over 900 pages. To this end, it simultaneously functions as an in-depth scholarly volume and a utilitarian reference tool. Arranged into two main parts of long chapters and short entries, the book achieves both continuity and diversity in approach and analysis. Although the long chapters and short entries can stand alone, together, they paint a rich portrait of information's longue durée, technological inventions, instantiations, processes, and wide reach from assorted angles. Comprised of thirteen long chapters, the book's first part builds a chronological narrative of information's history, from the premodern and early modern periods to the twentieth century and today. Each chapter supplies detailed overviews of, and interesting insights about, information within its particular sociocultural and historical purview, then concluding [End Page 1276] with substantial further-reading lists of resources germane to the topic. Every chapter makes references to other chapters, establishing connections between topics and facilitating dialog between contributors. Additionally, the editors have marked specific words with an asterisk on first mention within the chapters, facilitating convenient cross-referencing with a detailed glossary, placed near the book's end, which defines terms and clarifies their usage within the book. Containing 101 short entries, the book's second part concentrates on specific issues of special importance to the history of information. Alphabetically arranged, the entries extend the conversations from the preceding chapters by directing attention to or narrowing focus on specific aspects, topics, or themes. They also showcase further reading lists and draw connections between each other and the chapters by featuring "see also" cross references. The editors supply a user-oriented navigation aid at the beginning of the book in the form of two lists, the first an alphabetical list and the second a thematic list organized by concepts, formats, genres, objects, people, practices, processes, systems, and technologies. Through these internal cross-references, connections, and dialogs within and between the chapters and entries, the editors construct a seemingly unwieldly history. As a topic, technology traverses most chapters and entries, and even serves as the main theme or focus of multiple entries. This book should therefore appeal to historians of technology and specifically attract scholars and students interested in the intersections between technology, information, and history. Its interdisciplinary approach might also introduce some historians to ideas and literature beyond their disciplinary concentrations and, in turn, help them forge new or previously unknown or unexpected relationships between their work...

Abstract: The artificial intelligence (AI) industry, expected to reach $1.81 trillion by 2030, is revolutionizing sectors and economies worldwide. Its growth, however, intensifies global disparities and contributes to human rights abuses. This study explores two key questions: How does AI development lead to human rights violations, particularly in labor exploitation and environmental harm in the Global South? In what ways do these practices intensify systemic inequalities? This article demonstrates that AI functions as a form of digital colonialism, concentrating wealth among a global elite primarily in the Global North, while the Global South suffers from dehumanizing working conditions and environmental consequences. Laborers in the Global South endure unstable employment for low pay, supporting AI advancements while remaining unseen in the industry's narrative of progress. Concurrently, resource extraction and power-hungry AI data centers in the Global South damage ecosystems already impacted by climate change. This article emphasizes the critical need for responsible AI governance that emphasizes workers' rights, ecological preservation, and balanced global progress.