AI and Society

By Muhammad Ali

As I finished reading Code Dependent, a book written by Madhumita Murgia, I couldn’t help but feel unease in the aftermath of the installation of the “Great” firewall in Pakistan. Especially reading her account of how AI, facial recognition technology is utilized by the authoritarian Chinese establishment to crush dissent and persecute the Uyghur Muslims within its borders. Looking at the dynamics of one successive quasi-democratic regime to authoritarian martial law administrators, I wonder how technology has impacted the very fabric of our lives and how it will shape our society.

From the keyboard warriors of a certain hero worshipping semi-cultish PTI to millions of fake X accounts that jump into verbally abuse and character assassinate anyone critical of the established order, to the brutal crackdown on dissent by the current set-up, the weaponizing of internet blackouts, the assault of fake news on our senses on a daily basis, and the usage of deepfakes to propagate the narrative used by miscreants, modern technology and AI is already chipping away the old order as we know it.

Even the West has battled against this massive technological upheaval. From the Russian interference in the American elections to the incel movement that plagued the whole world, to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, society had to redefine the meaning of freedom of expression and had to juggle how to keep certain core values of social order intact. But we as Pakistanis have been caught off guard and seem to be jumping from either squashing all sorts of dissent to going for a free-for-all in the digital sphere. As I type this, radical outlets spread their messages with impunity and little, if any, oversight. A recent example of having to watch an ultra-orthodox person attack girl’s education and polio vaccination is a shining example of how both at a national and international level we have failed to have oversight over data. Instead—due to our flawed democracy and rule of law– our outrage has been towards crushing dissent from the left and liberal sections of society.

With technology comes its own set of laws, associations, and mass consciousness. If we look around, we see a cosmetic existence permeating our interactions, the basic “human element” has gone astray. As an example, if you stop a Food Panda rider to offer them a glass of cold water when they are parched and it’s boiling outside in the summer of Lahore, they will tell you that they don’t have the time. Their existences are timed by an ever-waking, watchful AI algorithm that seeks to control when they can rest, sleep, eat, drink, or take a restroom break. Not only that it pits each one of them against the other, making them fight for the rides in an area, for higher paying customers, for higher ratings, while to be offered the lowest rate, to work the hardest, fastest and neglect their well-being, to be so pressurized to drive recklessly so that they’re not rated negatively on the app and in turn get better and more lucrative orders. This is the world that is being built by the cold logic of AI.

Since social media and algorithms have such vast and potent impacts on our consciousness, it is conditioning us to be forever consumers of media. Our social existence on social media ruled by ever-changing and meticulously learning algorithms puts us in a bubble or information loop where we see what we like and we listen to only echoes of our own thoughts and opinions. From celebrities to advertisements, from videos we stream to the books suggested to us, it is all geared towards who we already are. What we search and consume in terms of data is creating what we will turn out to be.

If this perpetual cycle of creating echo chambers seems disconcerting, imagine this happening at a global scale with billions glued to their screen, fed data geared to their likes and dislikes, continuously conditioning them. One wonders if we are training the algorithms or the other way around.

However, we cannot negate the class aspect of this exchange. Data feudalism is as real as it gets. With the censoring of the Israel & Palestine conflict, the control of information, the selling of our data to corporations, and the creation of a digitalized prototype of our minds, we are pawns in a wicked game played by billion-dollar corporations who scrap our data and sell it to the highest bidder with little to no regard of the consequences of such a venture.

Societies in turn have built regulations through regulation, unionization, and solidifying the responsibilities of these multi-national corporations such as Uber enabling people to have an agency when they work for AI. Even in India, with the recent movement to unionize Samsung, the presence of unions for digital workers such as All India IT & ITeS Employees Union, and All India Gig Workers Union (AIGWU) are a wonderful example of how the state has played its role in regulating these multi-nationals who like to portray their workers as “contractors” and assert that they’re playing the role of mediators between the clients and the service providers, leaving them with little or no responsibilities and letting them run awol through the system.

My concern remains that we are ill-prepared to tackle the onslaught of the AI technologies to come. If unregulated and let run amok, they will turn our society into a cold, draconian dystopia that will give new meaning to the term Orwellian State. What needs to be done is for civil society to concentrate and understand the dynamics at play when it comes to dealing with these giant conglomerates that use AI to get cheap resources from the developing world. They need to work with the modern digital workers who might not be the oily railway worker of Lenin’s vision, but they are equally exploited and have no collective voice or bargaining power. This involves academics and labor unionists working in cohesion to develop literature and to work with these heavily exploited individuals to develop a future course of action.

Muhammad Ali uses various mediums, including music and writing, to articulate his thoughts.