Sovereign AI and Latin America and the Caribbean

The Exceptional Caribbean is the centre of the modern world. From here the modern world as we know it, was made. Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is a civilization of the crossroads. The encounter with Europe was horrific for the Aztecs, the Mayans of the Yucatan, the indigenous enslaved on the Caura encomienda in Trinidad, those trafficked through slave ports and in slave ships through the Middle Passage during salt water slavery, and the countless who were coerced, tricked, and forced with eyes welling with water into ships to become an imported work force from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

Collective ideologies and Enlightenment philosophies bracketed plantation societies. Shared beliefs and Enlightenment ideas like mechanistic time, circulated across the ocean allowing planters to cultivate carbon copy patterns and practices of plantation management. At the start of the seventeenth century the European mind, the mentality, the ontology, of Europeans was still fundamentally continuous with that of their own antique and medieval predecessors; but by the end of that period it had become modern.

The zeitgeist of the Enlightenment roused thinkers from lethargy. From this ferment of minds many marvellous improvements were made in every art and science. This philosophical movement, the Enlightenment, contributed to the eighteenth-century liberalization of commerce, government, religion, and reasoned agency.

The ensuing scientific revolution intermingled with elements of the Enlightenment, producing an “Industrial Enlightenment”. This in turn gave rise to the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution. Enlightenment philosophies intensified the Industrial Revolution, and was partly responsible for bringing mercantilism to an end and replacing it with a more open and competitive economic system. And while it created opulence in the core, it left in its wake inherited inequality and intergenerational immobility in LAC.

In chapter ten, of “Encountering God in History – A Theology of Liberation” (1973), the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez famously wrote: “The future of history belongs to the poor and the exploited,” (p. 120). On his ninetieth birthday, Fr. Gutierrez received a letter from the Holy Father in Rome. Pope Francis thanked him for his attention to social justice and his “preferential love for the poor and discarded of society.”

In “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” (2005) Paulo Freire describes how technology can submerge us into a “culture of silence.” For Freire there is no such thing as a neutral education. Education either functions as a tool to facilitate the integration of the present generation into the logic of the inherited system, or it becomes “the practice of freedom”.

For Development to become Freedom, information organisms in LAC must deal critically and creatively with the new realities of AI. Governments must nurture the talent to independently develop and deploy specialized, self-supporting AI solutions at different levels using their own infrastructure, data, networks, businesses, and digital citizens. Only then will LAC have Sovereign AI to boost economic competitiveness.

The development of an educational ecology to facilitate this process will lead to unknown tensions. But it would mark a bend in the river in Caribbean history. AI will give education a new identity. Contemplating on how AI will change the ecology of Caribbean education, Vice Chancellor Professor Paloma Mohamed Martin of the University of Guyana asks the inspirational question: “What is Education going to be about?

Modernist views about human potential and the most effectual way to nurture it were founded on Enlightenment thought, itself grounded in Cartesian certainty, and Newtonian stability. The union of this outlook with industrialism, allowed modernism to develop definite social and epistemological visions. Descartes – following Galileo and preceding Locke categorically separated the objective from the subjective.

We inherited from Descartes a curriculum architectonics for discovering a pre-existent world, not a method to predict the structures of proteins using AI. Overall the Ralph Tyler’s four fundamental foci for curriculum planning remain a variation of Descartes general method for reasoning.

Descartes’ long chains of reasoning toward clear and distinct truths progressing in measured degrees is a carryover from Euclid’s geometric methods. In such a frame, facts and the imagination remain divorced. Ends are pre-stated in the curriculum catalogue and remain external to the process of knowing in the lecture hall.

The sterility of such an approach is contrary to what is now developing in post-modern physics and chemistry. AI forces us to conceive of a pedagogy based on creativity. AI opens the way for a “third way” that embeds openness and closure in pedagogy.  It is a frame that focuses on the interactive and dialogic relationship among the horizons of the learning environment, tacit knowledge, the teacher, and the curious student.

Such an experiential epistemology emphasises knowledge creation not discovery, negotiation not verification. AI opens the way for a LAC Curriculum that allows learners to build matrices of representations using multiple perspectives, conscious presuppositions and personal subjectifications. These are the features of hermeneutics, not logic.

The curriculum that embraces AI will have a polyfocal conspectus. It will be thick in problematics and perspectives. It will not vacillate between viewpoints but allow them to interact. In this lies the keys to transformative development as AI takes pedagogy beyond only one type of knowing: a definitional, rational knowing.