Thinking the Unthinkable in AI: Four Hegemonic Ways of Seeing AI and Five Majority World Ways to Move Beyond Them

Abstract

When powerful technologies emerge, they bring with them questions of frame, view, and narration. Often, these technologies, like Artificial Intelligence (AI), appear to determine what happens on a world stage, even as they are embedded in arrangements of power that elevate particular places, subjects, and ways of seeing. This paper investigates four dominant ways of narrating AI developments in the current moment: labour futures, information integrity, human creativity, and over-reliance on regulation. Through these frames, particular histories and futures are privileged while others are silenced. Drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot's concept of the unthinkable in history and Milton Santos’ theories of the used territory alongside Shahidul Alam's concept of the majority world, this paper suggests alternatives to these ways of seeing that emerge from thinking about AI from a majority world perspective. These alternative frames are: technolabour precarity, public contestations and political histories, relationality, and shared problematics. They point towards an understanding of AI that concomitantly reflects the empirical experience of the majority of the people in the world, and points towards AI futures that can match those experiences.