Thread on why this is so disconcerting relative to #Ethiopia and #AIEthics https://twitter.com/abebab/status/1342238827675602945

Abeba’s PhD is enactive cognition, The premise is roughly that cognition is not the internal processes of an agent but an event that’s inherently social and dialogic. She wrote a beautiful essay describing this concept in 2017. https://aeon.co/ideas/descartes-was-wrong-a-person-is-a-person-through-other-persons

She occupies a unique vantage point in AI Ethics where the upper limits of the critique are demands for stronger regulation of *surveillance capitalism* a term seeking to describe a reconstitution of capital where Big Tech monopolies extract and monetize our data w/o consent

But, Surveillance capitalism doesn’t sufficiently describe how these computational structures are changing the ways we relate to each other and form society. Classification, prediction and quantifying human behavior is central to Machine Learning models and to a carceral state

If I was Google, the corporate diversity discourse following the firing of Timnit would be a best case scenario. It doesn’t challenge or expose the core issues. Few seem to know what Google is beyond G suite + search.

Abeba’s work had the potential to do just that in my opinion

I see a growing awareness w/in the #Ethiopian political debate about the content moderation powers of social media- particularly the deplatforming of marginalized viewpoints + amplification of misinformation. I’m trying to articulate is this is just a small piece of the puzzle

Categorizing condemnation of PM Abiy Ahmed as TPLF supporters, articulating the war as a necessary evil is a familiar trope that on its own is unworthy of comment. But, it’s worth paying attention in the context of AI Ethics where so much geopolitical power+money is concentrated

Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiatives proffer a representation politics which perform an aesthetic of progress while intentionally omitting deeper class and political analysis. This is how you get state propaganda and #BLM in the bio

It’s also how you get a paper, Towards Decolonizing Computational Sciences that cites only herself and 2 white researchers who have reduced decolonization to a call for diversifying developers in AI

There’s much more to say that is beyond what I can explore in the Twitter format, but I want to underline that simple dismissals of this as urban elites yet again disappointing us as genocidal apologists is not productive in seeing the bigger picture.

A lifetime rolodex of key players or acronymed parties will not allow you to see the ways in which Big Tech and the conversation around its ethical implications have potentially facilitated a failed state in Ethiopia.