Data, Surveillance, and Colonialism In the Age of AI

The popularization of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Generative AI, has been adding serious turbulence to knowledge production and reproduction worldwide. AI presents itself as an objective and scientific tool because of massive datasets called the Large Language Model, and chains of algorithms that enables AI to respond to questions, analyze subjects, or make decisions. Yet, defects of AI have been also pointed out, producing false information or “hallucination” and operating with hidden biases, on top of public concerns about loss of employment, lack of transparency, and mental health. Among these issues, this session focuses on inequities embedded in data. We encourage scholars to situates AI in a longer history of technologies and unpack unequal mechanisms of knowledge production and distribution in an increasingly automated form. A growing number of literature reveal that data collection from racialized individuals is historically inseparable from surveillance towards their bodies. The British imperial police implemented fingerprinting technology to govern India and South Africa; the transatlantic slavery generated numerous tools of racializing surveillance, from slave tags to bodily descriptions; Palestinians are tracked by the Israeli software as objects of military operations. As such, data have been utilized for colonial ruling and racial capitalism. Thus, this session welcome papers that explore: how states and corporations collect and analyze data from marginalized communities in historical, local, or evolving situation; What social conditions enable or ease systematic data collection, surveillance, and automatic decision-making via technologies; and how we can mitigate, regulate, or decolonize unfair development and use of AI.