Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence: Reflections for the Islamization Project
(This article is based on my resent presentation at a conference organized by Information Technology University Lahore on Islamic Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. You can also watch the presentation via the following link)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3DgjpqGbcQ
This article is about the history of political economy of artificial intelligence and how this understanding of history can help us make better decision when we attempt to Islamize technologies like AI …
First I will try to show a blind spot in the contemporary Islamization project which is going on since a few decades now, I will go into our own history to evaluate the route the Islamization project is taking at the moment which is causing this blindspot… then I will move to discuss the political economy of the contemporary capitalist world, and will talk about its historical background and will explain artificial intelligence as a tool which further enhances the influence and power of the modern capitalist institutions … in the light of this discussion I will try to leave the reader with some questions which should be considered by anyone attempting to Islamize modern technologies like Artificial Intelligence …
Today in the Muslim world we are witnessing this trend of adapting the modern capitalist institutions and inventions through this process of shariah compliance … I believe in our attempt to Islamize we are committing an unintended mistake — and that unintended mistake is to ignore the systemic and political influence of modern institutional framework …
I often use the following metaphor to explain the problem which I intend to highlight here as well …
Lets imagine for a moment that the horse you see in the image below is sick and dying. So to help this horse, would it be a good idea to take out its body parts and fit them into this machine which resembles a horse and even take out the skin of the horse and put it over the machine …
So if we do this, WILL we be able to save the horse like this, or we will create just an illusion that the horse is alive … I think this is what we are doing with Islam today, we are taking out some components from an Islamic way of organizing life, and putting these components into an alien structure in the name of shariah compliance … and when we do this to an institutional structure we also put the term Islamic with it like Islamic banking … We then assume that we have taken a step in the direction of reviving Islam in the society and eventually a time will come that this alien structure will completely transform as per the values and spirit of Islam …
May be on a micro scale we see bits and pieces of Islam in practice within the institutions, but on a macro scale, we can see the parts scattered within an alien mega structure, which may be using these parts for its own advantage, in a way which Herbert Marcuse refer to as Repressive Desublimation ….
This brings us to the question, that why we are doing this, why are so oblivious of the institutional influence, specially the kind of power it holds over the society, and this power — WE SHOULD TAKE NOTE — is not there to establish the sovereignty of God, but to establish the sovereignty of the financial capital maybe or some other man made idea for that matter … perhaps we are going to engage with Artificial Intelligence or other contemporary inventions as well in a very similar manner …
So what makes us so oblivious and take such a route towards such superficial attempts toward Islamization?
To answer this question perhaps we need to look at what happened in the Muslim world for example in the subcontinent during the colonial period … specially as an aftermath of the 1857 war of independence we perhaps decided that it may be better to avoid any confrontation with our colonial masters, so we accepted their methods of governance, of organizing the society, or running the economy for that matters, even we adopted their model of education …
Quaid-e-Azam r.a perhaps understood the problem with the institutional design of western origins, like if we listen to his speech on the inauguration of the state bank of Pakistan, we do get a sense that he was trying to highlight the need to develop some alternatives to the economic system at least … but he did not had enough time nor anyone one else was interested to pursue his vision perhaps ..
So today after a few generation of living with in a set of alien institutions we now experience Stockholm syndrome on a collective level. What we often refer to as the system, was forcefully imposed upon us by the colonial forces, and as a result the colonized people, including our ancestors, were held as hostage by these institutions for a long time … today after many generations, a significant number of us are not just dependent on these institutions, but we also try to legitimize the authority of these institutions through shariah compliance …
It appears that the whole ummah including us is suffering from this collective form of Stockholm syndrome, where we have perhaps fallen in love with those institutions which may still be allowing the colonial masters to rule us by proxy …
Perhaps over the generations we have developed a kind of affection towards the institutional framework which by design serves the neo-imperalist agenda, or by design are meant to establish the sovereignty of the financial capital for example, and today we willingly endorse these institutions, even put Islamic with them, as long as these institutions appear to be shariah compliant …
So the Stockholm syndrome perhaps is creating a huge blind spot in this movement of shariah compliance, and that blind spot makes Muslims today obscure to the political influence of modern institutions, including the economic institutions, including the new technologies which are emerging from within these institutions and impacting the world today at an astonishing speed … so there is a dire need to introduce the political economy perspective to the students and scholars involved in the Islamization project so they become conscious of the power which modern institutions have to influence the society …
The system
There seems to be a belief that it all depends on the intentions and will of the human agency, and the devices or institutions or technologies which are used to exercise human agency do not have much of an influence on what we think and do …
“Can a car fly if the driver is a pilot”?, if we ask this question from any one, the answer would be obviously that ‘no cars do not fly even if the driver is a pilot’, simply because the structure of the car is not designed to fly … same is the case with institutions as they also put constraints on human behavior no matter what their intentions may be.
Institutions are primarily structure of rules which exercise power in at least two ways, first they divert behavior of employees towards some desired outputs through a mechanism of rewards and punishment, and secondly they add-up output of each employee to generate a cumulative output … Individuals working within these institutions have little control on how their individual outputs will be utilized by the institutions they are a part of …
To explain the difference between the structure and the agency, Noam Chomsky once said ‘you might be nicest person but if the institution you are working for is a monster you also become a monster’ …
When I mention the term institutional structure, I do not merely mean a bank or university or a hospital, I refer to the entire hierarchy of various institutions on local and international level, which reinforces a discipline on each other to ensure that institutions keep performing as they are designed … banks for example reports to the central banks, and central banks are suppose to follow the standards of international financial regulators, likewise, hospitals are under the health ministry, and on international level we have organizations like WHO, and hospitals are also connected to the pharmaceutical industry and universities on a horizontal plane … the whole system today operates very much like a machine, where each component of the machine puts constraints on the operations of the other parts of the machine …
From where THE (modern) SYSTEM came from? A little history
So now let us come to the question ‘on a very basic level, what purpose modern institutional structures actually serve’ … and to answer this question, we may want to first look at the changes in the basic idea of the human nature in 15th and 16th century in Europe …
Rene Descartes established that humans are rational beings and capable of objective thinking, however human beings also had an irrational, subjective or emotional side as well … Thomas Hobbes also established that human beings are essentially selfish therefore untrustworthy therefore they need to be controlled in order to be protected from one another … This idea about human nature was endorsed by nearly every famous thinker or intellectual in western history, Ayn Rand is perhaps the last famous example in this context … To cut the long story short, the rational and objective side of human beings was eventually seen as superior … and the irrational, subjective or emotional side of human beings was seen as inferior but also inseparable part of human beings …
So to protect human beings from their own irrational or subjective side, an institutional order emerged in Europe which favored the rational or objective side of human nature, but tried to remove their irrational or subjective side … So the primary aim of the modern institutional structure has been to eliminate the human subjectivity to exercise any influence in the process of achieving any institutional goal … and if its not possible to eliminate then it must be manipulated to achieve the institutional goals … (For details see ‘The Trap’ a BBC documentary by Adam Curtis)
However if we compare this European development with how we see human nature in Islamic thought and history, it is not too hard to see the contrast … the human subject was not seen negatively in Islamic history, except in one case when Ottomans established a military bureaucracy to prevent nepotism, other then that we do not see any obvious example in Islamic history where human subjectivity is seen as problematic, but is integrated into the Islamic way of life … (For details see Wael Hallaq’s book The Impossible State)
But on the other side in Europe, perhaps it was perpetual conflict between countries, and between different groups within the society which led some Intellectuals in Europe to believe that human being are by default selfish and untrustworthy unless proven otherwise therefore we need rational structures of power to minimize the destructive influence of the subjective part of human beings …
Predict, manipulate and control
A part from the possibility of conflict, human subjectivity was perceived in Europe to be causing another problem, that is it makes human beings unpredictable … This was a serious problem for the capitalist class as their returns on investment became uncertain if the behavior of the workers and the consumers and the society in general could not be unpredictable …
This was the time when world of physics already had shown that the behavior of the physical matter could be predicted, so likewise it was believed, and it is still believed that the behavior of societies and markets can also be predicted if we understand what mathematical laws govern them, so any possibility of social disturbances and subsequent market crash can be predicted …
This lead to the idea of collecting statistical data so that if any pattern of behavior is observed in the data, a mathematical function can be then developed … and using the mathematical functions the behavior of the public can be predicted in advance … and thus necessary measures can be taken to prevent any unwanted behavior which may threaten the long term investments of the capitalist class …
So now in this context if we see the recent evolution of power, we see the power is gradually being shifted to institutions which have a greater ability to control and manipulate human subjectivity and divert it towards certain so called rational goals like to increase productivity or to maximize financial capital … Here is a quick summary of the evolution of power during last 200 years:
- So a hundred years back or more we see British empire ruling much of the world in competition with colonial ambitions of other nations in Europe like Spain and France
- And then in the next 50 years or so we had many nations emerging on the map of the world which would manipulate citizen’s using ideas like patriotism … the purpose has been to channel human subjectivity towards the goals of the state, most importantly to increase productivity measured in GDP ever since …
- And immediately afterwards the world divided itself into the two blocks, one on the side of capitalism led by the US, while the other on the side of communism led by USSR …
- Capitalism then won over communism perhaps because it had develop better mechanism to manipulate human subjectivity … In other words, we had all these multinational corporations emerging as victors of the cold war which eventually accumulated greater power to manipulate human subjectivity … the so called MNCs perhaps had the greatest amount of economic data and knowledge about consumer preferences which perhaps made MNCs more powerful then nation states ….
- And now in the last 20 years, we have seen the rise of a few tech companies, which perhaps posses data about their users more then anyone else in entire human history, and therefore posses the greatest capability to predict and manipulate the human subjectivity for their advantage … so now tech companies has perhaps more power then the traditional brick and mortar firms by virtue of the data they have …
Internal transition within institutions
While the state institutions or corporations attempted to predict, control and manipulate human subjectivity on a macro scale, the internal structure of MNCs also turned more and more like machines, reducing the need of human labor from the production to an extent that fully automated production units are a very much a reality today …
Muscle power has been completely replaced with machines now in perhaps most mega corporations, however up until recently there was no alternative to replace human brain …
So now artificial intelligence comes into the picture, which appears to possess ever increasing capacity to replace human brain at least for the tasks of routine nature … so if the AI keep advancing like it is now, it is possible that the human subject may become completely eliminated from within state and market institutions in perhaps a few decades from now …
Harari has even predicted that the project to eliminate human subjectivity will proceed towards eliminating subjectivity even from within human beings with technological hacks which can for example eliminate fear from our minds or produce emotions on demand through some implants in our brains, wearable tech which claims to do that is already available … such brain hacking technology is being presented as a step up in the process of human evolution, and the era of technologically enhanced individuals is being referred as a the era of transhumanism …
But rejecting human subjectivity has a huge down side … Carl Jung in the west and Iqbal in our own history has acknowledged almost a century ago that the modern man is facing a psychological and spiritual crisis because of the rejection of his own subjectivity, and for that the modern man has even created an institutional structure for that purpose, and when its not possible to eliminate subjectivity then the institutional structure tries its best to predict, manipulate and control it for outcomes which are referred by the modern man as rational like perpetual growth in wealth and power … but according to Carl Jung the modern man keeps paying a huge price of such repressive desublimation in the form of an epidemic of mental illnesses and life dissatisfaction …. Gabor Mate more recently also suggested that there is an epidemic of psychological trauma which is ravaging the developed part of the world …
Addiction, Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence
Capitalism is a kind of system which profits immensely from the problem which itself creates … the dissatisfaction of modern man has already become a multi-trillion dollar industry which attempts to make the modern man addicted to products or services including social media which temporarily takes away his pain but never address the root cause … (see ‘The Age of Addiction: How bad habits become big business’ a book by David Courtwright)
So social media giants for example today are able to collect huge amount of data of their users, and for that matter have deliberately attempted to make the users addictive as well for the same purpose … so much so that the financial valuation of tech companies is done now on the basis of how much data they have about their users not how much net profit they make … the data these companies collect is then again also utilized to further increase the addiction of their users as well …
The data is now also the new currency in the financial markets … so the more human subjectivity is rejected or manipulated in the modern society, the more the population feels dissatisfied with their lives, the more likely they can get addicted to various online platforms, so they will bring in more data from these tech companies, and more data means more financial value … and more data also means that the company can use the data to develop more powerful and effective AI to further replace human subject from the system or to manipulate them for the system’s advantage … it appears like a vicious cycle …
Artificial intelligence is being sold or will be sold to the public under the pretext of convenience, and in the name of convenience the public who is already addicted to the services offered by many tech companies may also end up becoming more and more dependent on the same companies who own these Siren Servers …
Jaron Lanier (a Microsoft executive and a best selling author) argues that bigger the capacity of these servers owned by a company, the bigger the capacity of the company to exercise some form of control … and of course it requires billions of dollars of investment to achieve that … so to take part and get ahead in the game of making people addicted in very large numbers to get their data, … one must attract the investment from those who can invest billions of dollars, … and when we do that we also have to buy in the vision of the investors, … and the investor could be a VC firm on the wall street, or it could be the US govt. or perhaps some authority in China for that matter …
Addiction to our own imprisonment
So where does that all lead us, it perhaps lead us toward creation of a digital panopticon, a kind of an invisible prison where the system would know in advance and can prevent people to do anything against the system even if it become necessary …
Yuval Noah Harari has been predicting that we are gradually moving into this era of digital dictatorships where the first time in the history of humanity the potential dictators can have more information about us then we have about our own selves … and the digital dictatorships can be seen essentially as the dictatorship of the capital as without capital its not possible to establish the technological infrastructure which is needed to collect, store, process all the data which gives power to the digital dictators …
So what do we make out from all of this … where do we fit in our shariah compliance mindset in the picture just presented here … so I think we should really become conscious of this Stockholm syndrome which as a society we are experiencing and realize this invisible prison a panopticon we are in, and this panopticon this prison is quickly turning digital now, and it is perpetuating very quickly by selling itself as a form of entertainment and promise us freedom, ease and convenience, but in reality it is trapping us into an invisible prison to eradicate the collective influence of human subjectivity from the society altogether …
Perhaps before opting the shariah compliant approach here as well we should ask our selves first:
- Do we want to cripple our selves on the subjective, emotional levels and live our lives more like machines or while being manipulated by machines? (Machines which were created by a civilization which has a bias against the subject)
- Do we want to encourage outsourcing of our social roles to be performed by systems driven by artificial intelligence?
- Do we want to replace human to human connection with digitally regulated relationship?
- Do we want to participate in this game which is adding to the sovereignty of capital on the entire planet?
