Reimaginando, reescribiendo: tecnología, datos & justicia

Towards community-led practices and participatory action research

Participant at Women in AI Ethics 2020

Mexico had an AI policy strategy drafted back in 2018. With it, the Mexican government prided itself in being one of the 10 countries in the world to have such a strategy; heavily focused on the 'readiness' of the country, responsible innovation, some hints of civil society involvement in the future and a page on ethics.

The obvious concern, already shared by some in the AI community, is that this goes with the dominant wave of “AI ethics washing”. Focused on bias and fairness, neglecting any questions regarding systemic injustice, power structures and control of infrastructures in the country. I truly believe, like many others; that when elemental systemic issues remain untouched, no amount of great innovations, bias and fairness trainings would be able to encapsulate and solve the complexity of the racial, power and control structures in Mexico (and everywhere).

As Kind (2020) mentions, moving from the mere knowledge that ‘technical’ systems actually involve ‘social’ systems, we can then be on a path of understanding that the social context in which these ‘social’ ‘technical’ (“sociotechnical”) systems operate are actually interdependent.

Mexico has and continues to struggle with its racism, its government has tried its best at denying and oppressing Indigenous, Black, rural & farmers' communities. Where racism is masked and denied as classism and remains a taboo. Then you wonder, “how can we even consider our AI systems to be fair and just?” . Good intentions dressed as ‘AI for good’, ‘ethical and bias trainings’ could simply not be enough.

Of course, there is the role of the geopolitical power imbalances that colonialism purposely designs and actively shapes AI governance and the debates going around (Mohamed et al, 2020). This, obviously; has played out in the recent rush to form global AI ethics guidelines where developing countries in Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia have been largely left out of the discussions.

The result being that the Global North continues to disproportionately benefit from global norms shaped for their advantage while at the same time colonizing structures within developing countries in Latin America (like Mexico) remain, then marginalized communities will continue to be oppressed.

How can Mexico and the rest of Latin America achieve ‘just AI’, if at all possible?

I am definitely not against Algorithmic based models, they are a good way to expand the imagination and understand a problem further, even discover new things in the natural sciences. However when used in social contexts, there is a whole complexity around them that no algorithm can nor should fix on its own, or perhaps at all?

Right now, there are already some ongoing projects, ideas and visions in Mexico, reimagining a “world where all worlds fit”.

The UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) seminars on ‘rewriting technologies’ are doing some amazing seminars on seeing technology with new visions, with situated and a critical approach to technology development in Mexico.

Back in 2017, before starting my Master's degree, I knew, like others that the current mainstream academic narrative around 'crime control' did not fit my community and other communities. Rural communities have been using their own resources to build their own resilience, social capital and overall empowerment in response to the failed policies on high securitization and militarization of the country towards “fighting” crime.

In a country where the narrative has been driven by those in power, the stigma against marginalized communities continues to be a driving force for further marginalization and securitization of our spaces. Many of these communities are already making use of digital technologies to write their own narratives, to raise the alarm on the injustices, to change the narrative online.

So the purpose of this project was to point out the already quite obvious but not taken serious alternative to the ongoing violence in the country — community-led practices through participatory action. In this way the idea was/is to bring historical data together of all the policies, crime targeted police systems, 'hot spot policing' that have been in place throughout a period of time with the goal of dismantling the state’s oppressive, militarized failed policy and to visualise data that the state’s policies and funding not only do not work but further perpetuate oppression.

These communities already have processes in place that work for them and empower their communities. It makes you reflect that the state’s approach should be not of what they can do without consulting these communities, but what they should do to support them and empower them with their knowledge and systems already in place, or work towards scrapping their failed policies and design new policies taking into account these communities' contexts and active involvement.

Perhaps my proximity to the context of many of these communities like my community allowed me to be context aware of any technical development and research involved. But I really believe that as researchers/developers our job is not that of an expert but an accomplice/a facilitator in supporting, facilitating and organizing where the communities have tutelage over these processes.

The goal is to collect as much data as possible on all the ways the government (police, military, favourite oppressive institution) have failed these communities time and time again, taking into account historical contexts, racial and structural power dynamics and geopolitical forces. In a perhaps counterproductive way, “Policing the government...(?) “

Of course I wonder, would these methods take us to liberation? I don't think so. There is a great need to rethink.

While I followed Cathy O’Neills article on ‘algorithms for defunding the police' a few months ago (which this project somehow intends to do in the Mexican context) and as I go into a PhD and further develop this project with my community and other rural communities in Mexico. Constant reflection and active participation with the communities is an essential part of how I see my involvement.

My hopes for the present and future of AI and technology in general is as Sasha Costanza-Chock mentions in her book Design Justice, to “continually challenge the ways that inequality is reproduced through the design of algorithms and support systems and emphasize the development of communities as an active participative process”. To reimagine new paradigms and rewrite technology.

References:

Costanza-Chock, S. (2020) Design Justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press.

Ellis, B.H. and Abdi, S.M. (2017) Building community resilience to violent extremism through genuine partnerships. The American psychologist, 72(3), 289-300.

Escobar, A. (2011). Sustainability: design for the pluriverse. Development, 54(2), 137–140. Hao, K. (2019) in 2020, let’s hope AI ethics-washing and actually do something. Technology Review. Ai ethical choices. Available at: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/27/57/ai-ethics-washing-time-to-act/. Accessed on 20/07/2020.

Kind, C. (2020) The term ‘ethical AI’ is finally starting to mean something. Venture Beat. The Machine: making sense of AI. Available at: https://venturebeat.com/2020/08/23/the-term-ethical-ai-is-finally-starting-to-mean-something/. Accessed on 24/08/2020.

Strategy AI-MX – Martinho-Trustwell, E., Miller, H., Asare, I. N, Petheram, A., Stirling R., Mont, G.C., Martinez, C. (2018) Towards and AI strategy in Mexico: Harnessing the AI revolution. White Paper.

Mohamed, S., Png, M. & Isaac, W. (2020) Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence. Philosophy and Technology https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00405-8

— Yadira