AI and the Politics of Information

In the African Atlantic environment “Myall” is a channel or portal among the practitioners of Kumina. Kumina is a way of life. It is embedded into the psyche of the Myall community in Jamaica. The practice of beating willowy joints of bamboo grass, and she-goat skin drums made from breadfruit trees tied with stout vines that once clung to the trunks of trumpet trees is part of the intangible cultural heritage of the African Atlantic Memory Bank. But Myall is more than a cultural artefact. It is an archetype for the AI transition in the Caribbean. The future cannot be created by the inertia of silence.

AI is not a new form of intelligence. AI provides a growing reservoir of smart agency for “inforgs” (information organisms) rooted in the AI channel during the infosphere revolution. AI is inscribing the world. So every government, company, agency, and academic institution designing and deploying AI must broaden their standpoints and contribute to a broader social, geographical, and cultural array of perspectives.

This is only achievable if AI is embedded into the consciousness of Caribbean people. It requires larger numbers of Caribbean people in the channel who appreciate, understand, and enjoy the opportunities and benefits of such a reservoir. The more AI is embedded into the Caribbean psyche the better Caribbean societies will become.

AI probes the circumstances that constrain possibilities to embed artefacts into a world that can interact with them. AI is a human. AI is already shaping political discourse with memes, deep fakes, vintage posters, and video clips. Decoupling intelligence from agency remains a challenge regarding bias, impartiality, intelligibility (how does it work), confidentiality, beneficence (do only good), nonmaleficence (do no harm), justice, confidence, autonomy, accountability (who is responsible for the way it works), transparency, and explicability.

Left unchecked the prejudices and prejudgements of the European Enlightenment can also be smoothly transported across the portal unnoticed into the infosphere. AI is a portal that pursues neither an expressive nor a narrow approach to the world. Since ethics is not the preserve of a single continent or culture, ethical AI guidelines and principles can only evolve if the codification of guidelines benefits from perspectives of regions and cultures presently un- or under-represented.

The agricultural and industrial revolutions resulted in the macroscopic transformation of political and trade structures, but social structures remained largely unchanged. The global AI horizon is a knot of imbalances and inequalities, and the West Indies remains both a place of contestation and contradiction.

Overnight a Russian Kazan nuclear submarine and four naval vessels furtively docked quayside alongside US Chevrolets in Old Havana. People don’t find faith or lose hope in political ideals outside of information technologies. The real revolution is in the distribution of information. Democracy and totalitarianism are simply different “information networks”. Totalitarian regimes centralize the flow of information in the channel. Tyrants barricade the truth to keep social order. It is a Myall or channel of fear and dread. Ultimately they have to struggle with the effects of ossification as everything flows to one place.

In Western democracies, computer chips were developed through open competition between companies like Toshiba and Intel. Their main markets were other private companies like Apple and Sony. These companies produced goods like the Walkman and the Macintosh PC. The struggle here is fracturing. Parts move faster than the whole. Moreover, parts move independently of the centre, and the centre may not hold as things begin to fall apart.

OpenAI launched a virtual assistant on November 30, 2022. Other assistants now include Gemini and Claude. Countries have decided on self-regulation to avoid pruning innovation and being exceeded in influencing the future. In the former Soviet, the semiconductor sector was secretive and geared toward only military use. The model was top-down. There was no scope for creativity and innovation in the private sector. In 1984, the first Soviet personal computer appeared. But by then eleven million people in the USA had PCs at home.

In book four titled “The Estranging Sea,” of the autobiographical poem “Another Life,” Walcott reminds us that “truth is nothing more than a puddle of clear water dammed in a ditch.” Truth is unblemished, but it is always blocked and impeded by watertight smoky mud on every side. It cannot flow freely.

Democracy and totalitarianism are purely different types of information networks. The radio did not create the Gulag and the collectivisation of Stalin. The Gutenberg press (1440) did not start the witch hunts prescribed in the Malleus Maleficarum (1486). AI did not create the humiliation rooms of deep fake content. In the age of AI, some uses are malevolent and others are ethical.

With the dawn of affordable radio sets, people in East Germany could receive a range of broadcasts to cultivate a spectrum of artistic and political views. But the government of East Germany jammed Western programming and punished those who secretly tuned in to listen. The technology was the same in East and West Germany, but the politics made very different uses of it. During the infosphere revolution, the task is to make the fluid use of AI part of the psyche of Caribbean people.