Peace and Prosperity for the Digital Age? The Colonial Political Economy of European AI Governance

We are Not
short of alarming accounts of the global power asymmetries and detrimental environmental, social, and political effects fostered and amplified by the production, design, and use of artificial intelligence technologies (AITs). From “surveillance capitalism”
[66]
, via the “black box society”
[50]
, “automated inequality”
[22]
, “algorithms of oppression”
[47]
to “extractive politics”
[17]
; from the “Californian ideology”
[4]
of “Big Tech” in Silicon Valley to the world of start-ups and specialist public sector contractors, like Palantir and Clearview, scholars highlight a wild west of disruptive technological innovation that has gone largely untamed. The whole globe is embroiled in its production and effects while the costs of “externalities” are paid by others: through large-scale environmental degradation from rare metal mining
[17]
, intensive carbon consumption
[19]
, underpaid and underemployed click workers
[3]
,
[58]
,
[61]
, violations of privacy and data protection
[5]
,
[48]
, and the amplification of societal biases in automated decision-making (a useful collection in a 2021 special issue of it Fordham Law Review).