Dear Reader,
As we conclude the first month of the new year, the upheavals of global politics appear to have already set the tone for the weeks and months that lie ahead. With the military operations in Venezuela and the controversy around Greenland, a primitive battle for scarce resources has taken centre stage. While much attention has been focused on the question of oil, it is important to remember that the critical minerals that power contemporary tech are just as much in play in this return to geo-political lawlessness.
Indeed, a process that has been overshadowed in the midst of all this is the sustained effort to push the United Nations into a state of obsolescence. This has been clear in the US’s official exit from nearly 70 international bodies this month. It has also been an important subtext in the launch of Trump’s recent ‘board of peace’, an organization that, as many analysts have argued, forms a new exclusive club for select leaders that is meant to supersede current multilateral arrangements. For now, it appears that tech is a sector whose international governance has survived this current onslaught. Yet, the US’s departure from an organization like the UNCTAD, and its general posture toward the UN, all raise alarm about what the future portends.
Yet, as this chaos unfolds, it has created considerable uncertainty for the old establishment as well. This month’s iteration of the World Economic Forum was a case in point. Far from the peans to globalization and the free-market that one is accustomed to, reports indicate that this year, the Davos elite are themselves struggling to find their way in these new waters. Perhaps the one enduring article of faith remains – the AI story, and its vaunted potential to secure the fortunes of capital. On this point, the proceedings saw a range of the industry’s experts attempt to dispel skepticism and tout the wisdom of letting innovation take its course, unencumbered.
The problem is that such discourse appears increasingly out of sync with popular perception, as serious anxiety about AI’s economic and societal impacts is now widespread amongst the public. Indeed, recent weeks have provided further evidence of how unprepared we are to tackle the radical ways in which this technology could alter our public sphere. After it emerged that the AI bot Grok has been used to create sexually explicit deepfakes of women and minors in the UK, a large backlash ensued with growing clamour for strong regulatory action. Initially, Elon Musk and officials at X tried to deflect the blame and claim that it was users who must be held liable and not the AI company. Yet, the fallout from this scandal has only grown, with vocal denunciations in the EU and some Asian countries going as far as to temporarily ban Grok altogether. In response, it has been announced that new technological safeguards have been placed to restrict Grok’s image-editing capacity.
This is certainly a positive step and a victory, but it calls into question a whole host of other issues. The same technology can still be used in other harmful ways: for scams, for less severe forms of harassment, for the proliferation of misinformation, and so forth. What is required is a far more comprehensive framework of norms and accountability, the political will for which still remains to be cultivated.
Meanwhile, for all the hype, there still remains no effective model to incorporate this technology into viable commercial success. In fact, for all the focus on productivity gains, even these have proved to be chimeral so far. As a recent survey of nearly 4000 tech CEOs showed, most have not seen AI lead to boosts in efficiency that are financially significant. An instructive parallel here is with the so-called ‘Metaverse’. Many of us will remember how much hype had been created around this buzzword, how much money was channeled into related projects, and how it became the anchor of Facebook’s entire rebranding effort. Where is it today? In the midst of laying off thousands of employees after having squandered tens of billions. At its current juncture, AI is also riding on financial speculation alone. Yet, it is of a different scale entirely and much more bound up with the fate of entire nation-states and power blocs. Thus, as Cedric Durand has outlined in his latest piece, it is the economic impasses of the West and AI’s failure to overcome them that are ultimately fuelling the belligerent geopolitics of today.
Where does this leave the countries of the South? These are certainly times of peril, but what is heartening is that these countries are fast recognizing the need to develop their own historical agency in the moment, and to actively shape the politics of this emergent technological paradigm. To take one example of this, India is now pushing for the installation of license fees for training data from the country. At this point, the draft law restricts itself to copyrighted material, but it opens the door to laying claim to the value-generation process of Artificial Intelligence, and this is a first step in a significant contestation.
As India also prepares to host the next major global AI summit in the coming weeks, it will be worth tracking whether such a Southern stance towards AI manifests itself in a more sustained and substantive manner.
The Datasyn Team
