Decolonial AI as Disenclosure

TL;DR

This paper conceptualizes decolonial AI as disenclosure, aiming to dismantle political, ecological, and epistemic borders in AI development rooted in colonialism, and advocates for inclusive, sustainable, and decolonized AI practices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decolonial framework based on Achille Mbembe's disenclosure concept to critique and transform AI development and deployment.

Findings

Decolonial AI requires abolishing borders in political, ecological, and epistemic domains.

Decolonial AI can empower marginalized voices and knowledge from the global South.

Disenclosure offers a new perspective for intervening in colonial patterns of AI development.

Abstract

The development and deployment of machine learning and AI engender 'AI colonialism', a term that conceptually overlaps with 'data colonialism', as a form of injustice. AI colonialism is in need of decolonization for three reasons. Politically, because it enforces digital capitalism's hegemony. Ecologically, as it negatively impacts the environment and intensifies the extraction of natural resources and consumption of energy. Epistemically, since the social systems within which AI is embedded reinforce Western universalism by imposing Western colonial values on the global South when these manifest in the digital realm is a form of digital capitalism. These reasons require a new conceptualization of AI decolonization. First this paper draws from the historical debates on the concepts of colonialism and decolonization. Secondly it retrieves Achille Mbembe's notion of decolonization as disenclosure to argue that the decolonization of AI will have to be the abolishment of political, ecological and epistemic borders erected and reinforced in the phases of its design, production, development of AI in the West and drawing from the knowledge from the global South. In conclusion, it is discussed how conceiving of decolonial AI as form of disenclosure opens up new ways to think about and intervene in colonial instantiations of AI development and deployment, in order to empower 'the wretched of AI', re-ecologise the unsustainable ecologies AI depends on and to counter the colonial power structures unreflective AI deployment risks to reinforce.