This project aims at contributing to a civic technological literacy in the context of a fast and massive deployment of artificial intelligence. With this goal, I conducted preliminary research and interviews as a preparation for future community activities including an email newsletter and educational events. An important approach here is perhaps symbolized by the unofficial slogan of the Science, Technology and Society field: 'It could be otherwise."
What, then, could be otherwise? Here I am referring to certain attitudes that convey the inevitability of AI development artificial intelligence as we know it. The enthusiastic deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and data technologies, spearheaded by the tech industry, facilitated by governments and promoted by media reports, so often disguises as innovation a power shift away from citizens and field experts towards unaccountable private corporations. As we are seeing in platform labor, the rise of surveillance economy, automated (i.e. privately outsourced) forms of criminal justice implementation, opaque decision-making in socially consequential areas such as finance, healthcare, and education, this process strips citizens from their agency as participants in the society, and instead pigeonhole them as consumers and passive objects of technological processes.
A popular narrative around AI involves the idea that AI is an inevitable constant of the future, to which we can but prepare. But the formulation that technology drives social change in such a manner is technodeterministic and ultimately ignores the political and social aspects of technological practice and knowledge-making. This project's goal is to imagine different courses of possible futures, and establish strategies to make these reality.
More concretely, it aims at providing an alternative to state initiatives for AI literacy, such as the National Strategy for AI planned by the South Korean government and aiming at supporting corporate profit and becoming the number one country in people's ability to use AI (http://www.korea.kr/news/pressReleaseView.do?newsId=156366736). What kind of future is assumed and what kind of imagination is afforded under this kind of perspective? The limitation of vocational training-centered literacy is that it does not necessarily allow critical perspectives of the technology being taught.
AI-driven automation relies on cheap labor to maintain the automation technology, often sourced via micro-labor platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turks. Meanwhile, social safety nets such as labor rights, unemployment support, or healthcare also suffer as a result of the disrupted labor market, increasingly precarious and perpetually freelance. Another vector of disproportionate vulnerability is geopolitics; people in non-Western regions are at a greater disadvantage, with most technological innovation and discourse being created and communicated in the Anglophone world, with the global South often being either the source of cheap labor and/or the object of technocolonialist experiments, reinforcing existing discrepancies that result from colonialist practices.
In the meantime, individual citizens and communities struggle to participate and critically engage in decision-making processes that enforce said technologies. One thing that makes it harder for citizens to participate is the inadequate communication of AI applications; often we will hear about incredible innovations made possible by artificial intelligence, or unrealistic scenarios of a machine uprising, but not enough about what these technologies actually entail and what their social implications are. While there exists work from academia and activist entities that attempt to counter the balance, it is far from sufficient.
This calls for a critical understanding of artificial intelligence and data technologies, one that affords agency to the people who use them and are subject to them; this is a call for a Civic Strategy for AI.
The Asia Young Activist Researcher Fellowship provided valuable support to develop this concept. Using the keywords Asia, youth, and technology as starting point, I especially focused on learning how to execute community activities. While my interest in civic tech literacy was already quite clearly formed, I wanted to learn more about tactics, logistics, and ways of communicating. As a preliminary work to said community practice, I started researching who is doing related work and met some of them to hear about important local issues as well as tactics and difficulties in conducting such work.
I had two main questions for this four-day period. First, locating people who are discussing AI technologies, society and power. Who is doing the work, and where is it being done? What are the locally specific issues (to Seoul, to South Korea, to Asia) that they are working on, and how does it connect to broader issues? The end result is an openly-available spreadsheet that includes a list of people, organizations and issues. (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1p3elkPmpELXtml_9VkmSl1tp9wrLznT-9thCl9bjeqw/edit?usp=sharing)
The second question is about making things happen: what are existing approaches and tactics that people use to build networks, disseminate knowledge, raise awareness, foster discussions, and so on? What are some difficulties and obstacles I should expect and how have people overcome them?
Additional questions I plan to explore in the future include: How can we articulate our concerns as citizens on AI technologies, and what are some concepts that can help that process? How can we claim agency over the technological systems that govern us, instead of being passive recipients? What tools are specifically necessary to address the concerns of young people? Of people in non-Western regions, focusing on Asia given my background? How do we bridge technological discrepancies across regions while avoiding replicating colonialist practices? How do we articulate non-Western perspectives on technologies, and how do we communicate it effectively? My project will explore critical data/AI citizenship while incorporating comparative and Asian-centric perspectives, in an attempt to connect regional specificities and broader common grounds. Seoul Digital Foundation (http://www.sdf.seoul.kr/) is a Seoul-funded smart city-related think tank which runs data literacy programs for individual citizens, communities and organizations. Woman Open Tech Lab (https://www.facebook.com/w.and.t.lab/) is a community which focuses on women and technology, sharing and learning technology while investigating the role and meaning of art and technology in society.
As a result of the fellowship project, I compiled the List for critical machine learning and artificial intelligence to which anyone can add entries. This spreadsheet will be continuously updated after the fellowship period, throughout 2020. (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1p3elkPmpELXtml_9VkmSl1tp9wrLznT-9thCl9bjeqw/edit?usp=sharing)
In addition, at the advice of AYARF faculty Kweon Ohyeon, I created a subscription-based email newsletter, Latent Space. (http://jjgg.info/) In addition to the newsletter archive, the website contains information about the project. Furthermore, I plan to develop a series of educational material that enables a critical understanding and use of machine learning and artificial intelligence, with a focus on the social implications of said technologies. An additional fellowship support from the Processing Foundation and New York University's ITP will facilitate the project's continuation. While the current COVID-19 situation requires me to focus more on online activities, the long-term extended goal of this project is to facilitate community events such as workshops and talks that address technology and society, connecting with different communities.