An AI Technology Observatory for the W.I.

AI heralds the need for small island developing states (SIDS) in the West Indies to explore the structure of intergenerational solidarity between those disadvantaged today and those that will be advantaged tomorrow. This is needed to guarantee that the disruptive transition between tomorrow and today will be as fair as possible for everyone. It is no longer a question whether AI will have a deep and abiding impact on individuals, societies, governments, and environments.

Instead, the debate is about how far this impact will be positive or negative. AI can enable self-actualization, that is, it can heighten the capacity of the people in the West Indies to flourish in terms of their life projects, interests, capabilities, skills, potentials, and aspirations. More AI means more human life spent more intelligently. The inherent risk is not the outmodedness of old skills and the emergence of novel ones, but the quickness at which this is happening unbolted, and the resulting inequality in the distribution of the costs and benefits.

The assumption is that the use of AI is synonymous with good innovation and positive applications of AI technologies. However, inexperience, dread, and misplaced concerns can lead SIDS to underuse AI, especially Blue AI. An AI Observatory is needed to avoid good intentions going awry, and the risks associated with misaligned incentives and malicious intent. All of these make new evils thinkable. Cartel offences like market manipulation, price fixing, and collusion will blossom with delegated artificial authority.

This moment is not in some distant future when agents will develop price-altering algorithms that generate near-instantaneous pricing information. AI-Assemblages may artificially inflate a stock before selling its position to unsuspecting parties. Artificial trading agents may alter our perception of the markets using automatic decisions. New offences will emerge in trafficking, selling, buying and possessing banned drugs.

AI-assisted crimes that fall under offences against the person including harassment and torture will have a topography in which the perpetrators will be able to distance themselves from the “ actus reus .” AI crime connects forgery and personation to theft and non-corporate fraud in cyber slavery camps concealed inside conflict zones. Already skilled workers from selected victim-origin countries are trafficked along transit routes.

People ultimately decide in what kind of society they wish to live. To ensure socially preferable outcomes, the brown leaves of islands that cling to the blue rim of the Caribbean basin must resolve the tension between incorporating the benefits and mitigating the potential harms of AI. The transformations of agency offer many opportunities in the West Indies. They also bring associated challenges and potential risks.

AI provides a growing reservoir of “smart agency”. AI offers the possibility to improve and multiply the possibilities for human agency. It is a resource that can enhance human agency at the service of human intelligence. AI offers vast opportunities for improving and augmenting the capabilities of individuals and societies at large. Human intelligence augmented by AI could find new solutions to legacy and new problems.

Fostering and nurturing the development of AI in support of new abilities and skills while anticipating and mitigating the impact of AI on old ones requires scrutiny and sweeping ideas such as the suggestion for “universal basic income.” Today, the key questions in the West Indies are by “whom”, “how”, “when” and “where” the negative and positive effects of AI will be felt. To frame these questions more pragmatically requires West Indian thinkers to consider the four main opportunities AI can offer the archipelago.

The four pivots that form the underpinnings of a West Indian moral anthropology that inspire a new understanding of self-worth and prosperity are: (1) Who do we want to become; (2) How can we exercise autonomy alongside delegated artificial authority; (3) What can we achieve given our individual and societal capabilities; and (4) How do we interact with the rest of the world, and with each other to achieve social cohesion and team spirit.

The larger the number of people who enjoy the benefits and prospects of such a colossal repository of smart agency, the better West Indian societies will become. Development is digital. AI regulations designed for and using inputs from large economies in Latin America may not match the AI Preparedness and Network Readiness of economies of small island states in the West Indies.

AI can offer these islands opportunities to improve and multiply the possibilities for human agency. However, West Indian human capabilities and agency will only be refined and expanded by the embedding of “facilitating frameworks” designed to improve the likelihood of flourishing eCommerce, digital shelves, community boutique tourism, art, music, theatre, drama, lighting, film, fashion, animation, and dance that are indigenous to the West Indies. AIxWI can become an agenda to explore how AI can be used to provision and advance the AI Sustainable Development of the West Indies.

Data governance, cybersecurity, and eCommerce involve high degrees of coordination complexity across Latin America and the Caribbean. These complexities can only be tackled if all stakeholders co-design and co-own the solutions and collaborate to bring them about. The result will be a cohesive response, both within societies and between them.