The Shadow of AI: Digital Colonialism and the Erosion of Agency

We need to understand how innovations can perpetuate inequality and harm marginalized communities

Scalable systems like machine learning are built to benefit large groups, but tend to work well at the expense of some. The ‘some’ are usually individuals and communities that are already othered, floating in society’s blurry edges, fighting to be seen and heard.

- Madhumita Murgia, Code Dependent

While innovation promises progress, its benefits are often unevenly distributed, creating a stark reality where advancements for many come at the expense of the already marginalized. In Monday's post, I explored this duality of innovation as a tool capable of being both a powerful force for good and a potential source of significant harm.

Today, I want to pick up on that and explore some of the harms in greater detail, as well as the need for value-driven approaches to shape how we support innovation. Madhumita Murgia’s book, Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI serves as an excellent guide for this. As the Financial Times' first Artificial Intelligence Editor, her expertise offers a critical perspective on the darker side of AI, especially around how we are witnessing new forms of digital colonialism.

If you think of AI, perhaps you first think of the big, primarily US, firms that are leading the space. Whether OpenAI or Alphabet, Microsoft or Meta, AI is the new frontier of technological development, an example of shiny new and exciting Silicon Valley innovation. You may take a broader lens, understanding it in the context of geopolitical competition, perhaps, or more focused on its transformative impact across sectors, redefining what work is. Throughout all, it is a sense, as Andrea Gawrylewski, the editor of Scientific American, has put it, that “For better or worse, AI is our future.”

Murgia’s book peels below that to much more deeply probe its insidious impacts and the reality of AI development, which is often less shiny Silicon Valley tech firm and more the modern manifestation of colonialism and imperialism.

Colonialism and Digital Exploitation