Green and Blue AI in the Caribbean

“If fortune shuts one door against us, it opens wide another […] and if I do not arrange to enter it, it will be my fault, and I cannot lay it to my ignorance …” (Cervantes, Don Quixote, XXI). In the West Indies, the enveloping of our territories into increasingly AI-friendly spaces is the transformation portal that we must contrive to cross. There is no limit to AI except human curiosity. AI is a science of the artificial. It pursues neither an expressive nor a narrow approach to the world. Rather, it probes the conditions that constrain possibilities for creating and embedding artefacts in a world that transacts with them furtively.

The world is adapting to AI, not vice versa. AI inscribes the world. It lengthens the lexicon of Galileo’s “Il Saggiatore” (1623), a metanarrative that stands continuously open to our gaze and written in a language of mathematics using triangles and other geometric shapes as characters, to now include logico-mathematical strings of binary code. These strings of code offer two critical opportunities to the brown leaves of islands that cling to the blue rim of this Caribbean basin. The first is epistemological. The second is ethical.

These two opportunities, the epistemological and the ethical explore the digital and the ecological “twin transitions”. Nothing is outside of these two agendas. On the epistemological front, AI can help SIDS deepen their understanding of the climate crisis. This can include studies of climate trends by processing huge amounts of data from multiple sources. Co-owned and co-designed studies smooth the scrutiny of existing climate developments and enable the forecasting of global mean temperature changes, and the predicting of climatic and oceanic phenomena like the El Nino, and tropical instability waves. AI tools can also be used to model the climate and measure the impact of policies. Moreover, consequences like heavy rain damage, and new patterns of climate-driven human migration can be analysed. AI systems can automatically label climate modelling data, improve approximations for simulating the atmosphere, and separate noise from signals in climate observations.

On the ethical front, AI-Assemblages can help deliver green solutions, including optimising power generation and use. In this sense, it can proactively contribute to the fight against global warming. Combating climate change requires a battery of responses related to decarbonisation. AI can be used to understand industrial pollution, measure the carbon footprint of concrete in construction, and energy efficiency in shipping. AI can be used in electrical grid management, and to forecast building energy use. AI can also support interventionist models like the Blue Carbon Credit System that improves digital mapping and monitoring of natural capital.

To ensure that good AI societies develop across the West Indies we must not forget that life without good politics, reliable science, and robust technology can quickly become “solitary, poor, revolting, pitiless, and short”, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. In this vein, embracing the epistemological and ethical opportunities presented by AI is paramount. Traditionally, epistemology focuses on the passive receiver’s view of knowledge, but it must now be troubled by the active sender/maker perspective. It is a shift from mimesis to poiesis. This is so because all knowing is designing, and all knowledge is constructed.

Conversely, ethics focuses on the sender, when it should focus on the receiver and the relationship between the maker/sender and the receiver. Logic focuses on qualifying our deductions when it must now be concerned with channels that allow the transfer and extraction of information from multiple sources.

These delicate shifts require the makers of the future state of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to bring into relief the engineering of artefacts that are co-designed and co-owned. This type of regional collaboration will output cohesive responses within societies and across borders. It will allow human agency to flourish by embedding “facilitating frameworks” specific to the Network Readiness and AI Preparedness of countries in LAC. These “facilitating frameworks” must have defined actions and funding instruments.

Chile convened twenty nations in 2023 to find a common voice for AI regulation and governance in LAC. At La Moneda Palace, experts from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, Paraguay, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela signed the Santiago Declaration on Ethical AI.

The conference of delegates stressed the importance of LAC nations coming together as a bloc for discussions on AI governance, and to ensure that the LAC benefits from the power of AI and actively participates in decision-making and the development of AI. Delegates agreed to form a working party to act as an Intergovernmental Council on Artificial Intelligence for LAC, led by Chile.

The working group will focus on strengthening regional AI capabilities and AI Preparedness. As the dialogue continues, another milestone on the path to ethical AI governance in LAC that demonstrates the region’s commitment to shaping its digital future will take place in Uruguay in October 2024. These two activities position LAC as a critical player in the global conversation about the responsible use of AI, and its regulation.