ai and the Middle East, final blog post (deadline July 22)
Recap blog post integrating key lessons from the course and proposing additions to or refinements of the Atlas of AI from the perspectives of studying the Middle East.
ai and the Middle East, assignment complementing the conclusion (deadline July 5)
Through the lens of postcolonial theory and Middle Eastern cultural studies, analyze how the development and use of AI technologies could potentially reinforce or disrupt existing power structures and cultural narratives in the region. Ground your analysis in specific examples and case studies from the course.
ai and the Middle East, Reaching for the Stars: The Middle East’s Celestial Ambitions and Archaeologies
As billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk pursue their ruthlessly ambitious visions of space colonization and off-world mining, they cast these endeavors as an escape from the limitations and “stasis” afflicting Earth. Yet their rhetoric echoes earlier epochs of extractivism and settler colonialism that have indelibly shaped the Middle East. What if we viewed the “new space race” not just through the Silicon Valley technoscientific imaginary, but through the region’s own rich astronomical legacies, cultural cosmologies, and fraught histories with colonial expansionism?
The Islamic Golden Age witnessed influential pioneers like al-Biruni, who calculated the radius of the Earth to a startling degree of precision, and Ibn al-Shatir, whose modeling of the solar system improved on Ptolemy’s geocentric theories. This continued a tradition of engaging with the cosmos that stretched back to prehistoric astronomical sites like Göbekli Tepe and Chogha Zanbil’s remarkable 5,000-year-old ziggurat. Al-Battani, another key figure, made significant advancements in trigonometry and astronomy, laying the groundwork for future space exploration. Such achievements laid foundations for subsequent space science and exploration, providing a rich heritage that informs current Middle Eastern initiatives.
Today, nations across the Middle East pursue ambitious space programs as symbols of technological ascendance and economic diversification. The UAE’s Hope Probe, which entered Mars’ orbit in February 2021, marked a significant milestone as the first Arab mission to another planet. Turkey’s Turksat satellites enhance communications infrastructure, supporting everything from broadcasting to internet services. Iran’s Simorgh rocket has successfully launched domestic satellites, despite international sanctions and geopolitical tensions. Israel’s private SpaceIL venture, which aimed for the Moon with its Beresheet lander, demonstrated the potential of non-state actors in the space race. Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan University operates a nanosatellite program, emphasizing education and innovation in space technologies.
Yet these high-profile endeavors also provoke polarizing debates around priorities and justice. Immense state resources funnel into the astronomic budgets and infrastructures for space exploration in countries still mired in poverty, conflict, and gender inequality. For instance, the UAE’s Mars mission is estimated to have cost around $200 million, a significant investment for a nation with ongoing socioeconomic challenges. Critics argue that such funds could address pressing issues like healthcare, education, and housing. However, proponents claim that these space programs drive technological innovation, economic growth, and national prestige.
There are also complex threads interweaving space activities with regional security dilemmas and geopolitical contests for primacy. The same rocket technologies enabling satellite launches stoke fears of latent weapons delivery systems. Iran’s space program, for example, has faced scrutiny from the international community over concerns that its advancements in rocket technology could be repurposed for military use. International governance regimes aimed at limiting proliferation, such as the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), could constrain national space ambitions. Rivals like Iran and Saudi Arabia beam signals of their technological capabilities through duelling spacecraft reveals, showcasing their advancements in a highly competitive geopolitical landscape.
Moreover, histories of colonial occupation, extractivism, and territorial conquest loom over contemporary space ventures in the region. The ostensible ability of whichever power “gets there first” to lay claim to celestial resources evokes traumas perpetuated by European and Ottoman expansionist projects. From Palestine to Western Sahara, the settler-colonial quest to “empty lands” is scorched into the Middle Eastern consciousness. This historical context adds a layer of complexity to current space endeavors, as nations grapple with the ethical implications of space exploration and resource extraction.
Space activity also carries weighty environmental repercussions that disproportionately impact the arid climate. Intensifying launches deposit particulates and greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere, contributing to climate change. The UAE, for example, conducted several rocket launches in a short period, raising concerns about the cumulative environmental impact. Accumulating orbital debris shrouds the night sky, posing risks to both current and future space missions. On an overheating planet farmed for its last drops of oil, water, and lithium, venturing outwards may seem like an escape, but it risks replicating destructive patterns of resource exploitation and environmental degradation.
Speculative writers like Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari and Mustafa Mahmoud offer Islamic visions of space exploration rooted in traditions of itinerant curiosity and contemplations of divine creation. The Quran metaphorically lauds those who “ponder the creation of the heavens and earth” and celebrates knowledge. Yet there are also warnings against transcending human limits and ethical guardrails through vain conquest. These cultural and religious perspectives provide a rich tapestry of thought that can inform a more holistic approach to space exploration.
Perhaps, ultimately, the quest is less for escaping earthly confines and more for addressing the mindsets and forces driving humanity towards those seeming limits in the first place. From the region’s foundation as a cradle of celestial investigation, a Middle Eastern space ethics and jurisprudence of the cosmos could emerge. One expanding humanity’s eco-spiritual consciousness rather than its footprint, rehabilitating outer space as a true common heritage before it is irrevocably enclosed. This approach would honor the region’s historical legacies while addressing contemporary challenges, offering a vision of space exploration that is inclusive, ethical, and sustainable.
ai and the Middle East, assignment complementing chapter “Space” (deadline June 28)
In student groups or individually, research and present blog posts showcasing innovative space/satellite AI initiatives by Middle Eastern nations. Assess potential applications and implications.
ai and the Middle East, The Algorithmic Ghosts of Empires Past
When we talk about artificial intelligence in the Middle East, we cannot untangle it from the region’s long and tumultuous history with power – the lingering spectres of colonialism, the brutalities of military occupation, the revolving hierarchies of ethnic and sectarian oppression. AI does not exist in a vacuum, but rather gets shaped by and shapes these age-old dynamics of domination and resistance.
Look closer at the AI systems being deployed across the Middle East and you’ll find the fingerprints of former empires still present. The very data mills that feed the machine learning models often mine their training examples from repositories of orientalist archives, anthropological texts, and multimedia propaganda pieces – relics riddled with colonial lenses and racist tropes about Arabs and Muslims.
Predictive policing algorithms promised to fight crime then criminalize entire communities based on their names or neighborhoods. Computer vision models struggle to recognize Arab faces without first associating them with stereotypes of violence and terror. Even the language models representing the region’s rich dialects and scripts remain sorely lacking, a statistical echo of centuries of epistemic oppression and alienation from knowledge creation.
But AI is not just an inheritor of bias from the past – it has become a powerful new frontier for authoritarianism and social control. Across capitals like Riyadh, Cairo, and Istanbul, regimes are turning to AI-enabled surveillance and censorship tools to identify dissidents, curtail online freedoms, and systematize discrimination against minorities. An entire AI-assisted architecture of oppression is being erected on the ruins of the Arab Spring’s dashed dreams.
From the deserts of Jordan where destructive mining for AI’s rare earth minerals is starting anew, to the drone warzones flickering with the code of lethal autonomous systems, the Middle East is being remapped as a region of perpetual extraction, exploitation and experimentation. Its people’s biometrics, locations, messages and emotions ingested as mere training data by Orwellian security states. Its bodies, spaces and resources terraformed to quench machine learning’s infinite thirst.
Some argue that the solution lies in democratizing AI capabilities, empowering local communities to develop and steward these systems themselves rather than be subjugated by outside tech powers. But such an agenda will require decolonizing the entire field – dismantling not just AI’s racist code but its deeper civilizational shackles to empire, capital and cultural erasure.
Because in the end, the battle over artificial intelligence in the Middle East is ultimately about narrative power – about whose experiences and worldviews get embedded into this world-shaping technology and whose are disappeared into the ether. It is a battle over the right to not just be seen and heard, but to dream new futures unbounded by the dogmas of machines designed to entrap.
Can we let AI become the latest tool for dehumanization and authoritarian control? Can we treat its harms as some unforeseen malfunction when they are so intricately pre-coded into its colonial logics? The age of powerful ethical scrutiny of AI’s impacts and politics, especially but not only in the Middle East is overdue.
Thought-provoking question:
If AI systems are so deeply rooted in colonial power structures and racist ideologies about the Middle East, can they ever be “truly” decolonized – and what would that even mean? –and democratized to represent diverse Middle Eastern, Arab, Turkish, Islamic, Yezidi, …, perspectives and experiences?
Or is reimagining an entirely new paradigm of humane and just artificial intelligence required – one not birthed from the epics of Western empire?
ai and the Middle East, Can the Middle East Develop an Indigenous AI Ecosystem Beyond Western Framings?
As artificial intelligence emerges as a transformative force reshaping societies and economies, a crucial question arises: How will the Middle East, with its rich diversity of cultures, histories and knowledge traditions, engage with and influence the development trajectories of this powerful technology?
From the outset, it’s important to recognize that the origins of contemporary AI have been heavily shaped by Western military priorities, corporate interests and Enlightenment ideals of rational calculation. The major breakthroughs powering today’s AI boom – from machine learning algorithms to massive language models – have their roots in research agendas cultivated by U.S. defense laboratories and tech behemoths. This framing of AI as an instrument of centralized power and social control represents a direct inheritance of the region’s colonial histories.
Yet, the Middle East is no mere recipient of externally-imposed technological narratives. Across its mosaic of nations and communities lie pluralistic wellsprings of knowledge that could catalyze alternative conceptualizations of artificial intelligence – ones grounded in localized contexts, value systems and lived experiences. These counter-narratives hold immense potential to not just develop indigenous AI capabilities, but to fundamentally reshape how we perceive the role of AI in service of more socially-conscious visions of progress.
Take, for instance, the ethical philosophies and jurisprudential traditions within the Islamic world that champion ideals of justice, human dignity and public welfare. What might a framework of “Sharia AI” look like if it prioritized these virtues over the encoded biases and profit motives of dominant AI systems? Emerging initiatives exploring the intersection of Islamic ethics and AI governance in places like Saudi Arabia and the UAE could provide crucial ethical guardrails for new AI systems centering human flourishing.
The region’s rich literary canons and linguistic heritages also offer radical new possibilities. The metaphoric expressiveness of Persian poetry, the complex semantics of Arabic, and the oral storytelling customs across the Levant and North Africa could all spark novel approaches to areas like creative language modeling and multi-modal AI – ones that move beyond reductive, decontextualized statistical representations. Advances in natural language AI grounded in these pluralistic knowledge systems may pioneer more nuanced, culturally-aware AI assistants and interfaces.
Furthermore, postcolonial thought emerging from Middle Eastern diasporas holds immense analytical power in deconstructing AI’s insidious reinforcement of power hierarchies and systemic inequities. Critiques interrogating how AI encodes Western epistemologies of extraction, surveillance and domination over subaltern populations are already surfacing. These contextualized lenses are vital for developing AI systems explicitly designed to resist oppressive dynamics and structural marginalization.
Of course, catalyzing a more pluralistic regional AI ecosystem will require confronting immense challenges around access, infrastructure and governance complexities. Bridging socioeconomic and gender divides to democratize AI capabilities must remain a priority. Defusing AI’s potential to exacerbate geopolitical conflicts and sectarian tensions through transparency and stakeholder engagement is paramount. And maintaining robustness against adversarial use of AI systems by both state and non-state actors will need clear ethical redlines.
Yet the Middle East’s heterodox knowledge systems, if harnessed judiciously, present a generative catalyst to reimagine AI beyond its Western military-industrial baggage. As this technology continues rapidly reshaping our world, the unique histories and futurist visions emanating from this cradle of civilizations could be vital in steering AI towards more pluralistic, equitable and human-centered trajectories that serve all peoples and societies.
In this pursuit, we must wrestle with a crucial inquiry: How can the Middle East’s diversity of traditional knowledge frameworks converge to shape an AI paradigm grounded in shared regional values of human dignity, socioeconomic justice and pluralistic co-existence? The answers may catalyze a renaissance in artificial intelligence.
ai and the Middle East, assignment complementing chapter “Power” (deadline June 21)
Geopolitical impacts analysis blog post. How could the rise of AI exacerbate or mitigate existing regional power dynamics and tensions in the Middle East?
ai and the Middle East, Confronting the Emotional Biases of Techno-Orientalism: Decolonizing AI’s Affective Gaze through Middle Eastern Lenses
As Kate Crawford powerfully articulated in the “Atlas of AI,” the design and deployment of artificial intelligence systems are deeply embedded with power relations, politics, and cultural hegemonies that demand interrogation. Her critique takes on heightened urgency when applied to the rapidly advancing field of affective computing and emotion AI – technologies that seek to systematize the recognition, interpretation and simulation of human emotional states. We must ask: Whose epistemologies and constructions of emotion are centered in these systems’ development? What are the implications of AI’s affective gaze being primarily filtered through Western cultural lenses?
From Middle Eastern and Middle Eastern studies perspectives, the predominant affective computing research appears to be firmly rooted in Western positivist frameworks that risk universalizing, essentializing and decontextualizing the study of emotion. This epistemological centering exposes the field’s disquieting resonances with the historic fallacies of orientalist knowledge production that exoticized and rendered monolithic the “Eastern other.” To develop an ethical, pluralistic affective AI ecology, we must confront this techno-orientalism and integrate insights that can decolonize and expand our understanding of affect.
Poetic, artistic and philosophical traditions across the Middle East offer crucial epistemic interventions by grappling with emotion’s transcendent, inexpressible complexities. The Sufi writings of thinkers like Ibn Arabi and Rumi intimate affect as a liminal realm of spiritual unfolding that exceeds categorical constraints. Arabic literary concepts of “haal” – the fleeting ephemeral state – subvert the stasis presumed in mapping universal emotions. From this lens, solely prioritizing facial action coding methods risks rendering affective AI rudimentary and reductive.
These traditions illuminate how emotion is inexorably embedded in cultural metaphors, language, embodied hermeneutics, and lived experiences. Diverse Islamic and Judaic intellectual discourses – from Al-Ghazali to Maimonides – provide alternative holistic frameworks for conceptualizing emotion’s role in cultivating human virtues like self-mastery, awareness and empathy. Integrating such plural knowledge systems is vital for developing affective AI that moves beyond mere detection towards nurturing emotional integrity and societal wellbeing.
However, proponents of affective computing must reckon with how region’s heterogenous cultural norms and power structures significantly impact attitudes towards emotional expression. Postcolonial and feminist critics crucially counter orientalizing rhetoric that essentializes emotion norms, highlighting diverse perspectives across the Middle East’s ethnic, religious and gender lines. The values of modesty, honor and emotional restraint in public spheres may fuel skepticism of technologies perceived as extractive or socially disruptive without nuanced, community-engaged implementation.
Oral traditions and literary canons further reveal emotion’s interdependence with semiotics, meaning-making and the sociopolitics of emotive performance across the region. Emotions are intricately woven into rituals of hospitality, grieving ceremonies and communal celebrations. Affective recognition that myopically isolates emotion as data points divorced from rich contexts risks perpetuating the colonial gaze’s violence of cultural translation and effacement.
As artificial emotional intelligence grows more pervasive, centering interdisciplinary collaboration with Middle Eastern scholars, creatives and practitioners is crucial for mitigating AI’s orientalist blindspots. A decolonial computing paradigm synthesizing plural epistemologies from the region could help interrogate the field’s normative assumptions and open new pathways. It may illuminate more holistic, socially-conscious affective AI aligned with the Middle East’s diverse understandings of that most fundamentally human experience – our emotions.
We must urgently ask: What violences and erasures might affective computing replicate if left unreflexively shaped by hegemonic Western techno-orientalist gazes alone? Integrating vital Middle Eastern perspectives can help cultivate a pluriversal, ethically-attuned affective AI that honors emotion’s transcendent complexities.
ai and the Middle East, assignment complementing chapter “State” (deadline June 7)
Investigative blog post. Outline an example of a Middle Eastern government’s use of AI for surveillance, security or social control. Analyze potential benefits and risks.