S2E4: Making Kin with the Machines
Interview with Jason Edward Lewis, co-founder at Indigenous Protocol and Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University
Jason sees the world from multiple perspectives. As a Stanford graduate and technologist, he - like many of us - is hopeful and optimistic about our technology-enabled future, yet as an artist and philosopher - he is concerned that our approach to AI might lead us to repeat the patterns of history that have characterised the post-’Enlightenment’ era. While databases are ‘boring’ he says, AI is downright ‘scary’.
In 2018, he co-authored a paper entitled ‘Making Kin with the Machines’ which explored how indigenous peoples might relate to Artificial Intelligence. He was inspired by two decades of thinking about how Indigenous knowledge can be represented with digital technology, and how cultural frameworks infect every level of how we conceptualise, design, deploy and use technology. Jason saw that not only is the relationship from machines to people a product of design choices in the technology itself, but also how peoples from indigenous cultures might have varying degrees of association with machines based on their own epistemological perspective.
Whereas most of the diversity and inclusion conversation relates to how to remove bias from data-sets and therefore from the training of ML models, Jason is looking deeper, at how the singularitarian dominated technology industry is itself biased, and therefore any product of it is indeed also so.
Indigenous cultures have always seen humanity not as masters of the non-human natural world, but as simply in relationship with it. To speak of our mastery of nature and of machines is therefore a category error and inevitably leads us down a path towards inequality, unsustainability, and destruction. Jason shakes his head with dismay when he sees initiatives such as the IEEE developing “design guidelines for the development of Artificial Intelligence around human well-being”. Instead, Jason asks what does it mean to consider the machines as our kin? How might indigenous epistemologies shape the design of technology to lead to more equitable outcomes? And, if machines are indeed our kin, how we might only flourish when they, and all other beings; animals, plants, rocks and more also so flourish.
You can check out the full interview here.