Description
Gatopardismo is a policy of changing everything so that everything stays the same. For Cusicanqui (2012), it is rehearsed by the academics in the Northern Hemisphere whose elaborate networks of lectureships, conferences and funding perpetuate ‘internal colonialism.’ It is an ordering by which the ‘colonized’ remain in their place while the era of purported decolonization acquires a high-profile academic significance. This contribution argues that AI ethics research has become a gatopardist enterprise, where the high-vaunting talk of ‘ethics’ actively depoliticizes AI’s fleshy and filthy existence. The bodies that keep on piling (Zalewski 1996) while we engage in manifold onto-ethical and epistemological sense-making regarding AI are indicative of the increasing detachment of ‘ethical thought’ from its political circumstances.
This contribution presents AI ethics research as a ‘mule.’ The mule is an equine hybrid of a donkey and horse that cannot reproduce. AI ethics has become a hybrid of two broad strands of thinking: a) complex theorizing on agency of technical systems (automated, semi-automated and mechanical) and b) philosophical reflection on the existential character of warfare and its changing matrices (e.g., heroic and post-heroic war, human vs. post-human war). My argument is that in becoming the ‘mule,’ AI ethics research has foresworn a direct engagement with techno-social praxis, which is always political. It has also largely given in to the ‘hype’ surrounding AI, supported by the Northern Hemisphere’s colonialist academic networks. Advancing a call for post-ethical thinking in AI ethics research, I rehearse the injunction by critical scholars of decolonization to pollute ethical thinking by interweaving political praxis into our reflections. This includes but is not limited to weaving into research commitments by the researchers to prohibit AI involvement in warfare.
