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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, Laboring Under Old Hierarchies: AI’s Fraught Inheritance in the Middle East

Kate Crawford’s incisive analysis in the “Labor” chapter of Atlas of AI reveals how technologies like artificial intelligence carry forward long-standing logics of exploitation inherent to industrial capitalism. When viewed through this lens, the Middle East emerges as a region where AI’s impact on labor is inseparable from enduring historical currents – outside forces that have continually remolded its economic and social order over centuries. AI’s ascendance in Middle Eastern workplaces today must wrestle with the weight of this contested inheritance.

The roots of the region’s prevailing labor paradigms can be traced to the encounter between the Islamic world and European powers during the colonial era. Colonial subjugation brought capita accumulation based on extractive resource industries and plantation agriculture – economic systems predicated on highly stratified labor forces. Peasants and artisans were dispossessed, while conquering powers secured compliant labor pools through mechanisms like the kafala sponsorship system still used to govern migrant workers in Gulf states.

This dynamic remade the socioeconomic fabric of Middle Eastern societies, entrenching ethno-racial hierarchies that assigned differential economic value and mobility to populations based on constructed identities like Arabic/Ajami, Berber/Arab, Turkish/Arab etc. Colonialism’s imposed hierarchies persisted after formal decolonization, shaping the incentive structures that led labor-importing nations to employ globally-sourced migrant workers in pecking orders based on national identity, gender, race and religion.

As AI systems are unleashed into this febrile environment, their propensity to mirror and amplify historical inequities comes into sharp focus. AI-based worker surveillance and management tools are proliferating in key Middle Eastern industries like construction, logistics and hospitality that disproportionately employ migrant labor from South/Southeast Asia and Africa. These data-intensive technologies enable tight control over workers’ time, movements and outputs in ways that troubled labor advocates see as further denuding agency and self-determination from vulnerable groups.

Far from the emancipatory promise of AI often touted in corporatist visions, critics argue these deployments actively resuscitate logics that date back to the coercive labor regimes of colonial plantations and workhouses. Automated technologies divorced from ethical oversight can reify the same discriminatory dehumanization – classifying workers into efficient data flows to be optimized in service of management diktats. Echoing Crawford, they position AI as the latest assemblage in capitalism’s continual refinement of labor exploitation, surveillance and control.

This damning perspective resonates when considering cases like the alleged racist facial recognition systems used by multinational construction firms during infrastructure builds for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Or Dubai’s vast networks of surveillance cameras and monitoring systems pervading its labor camps and Urban construction zones – a techno-extension of the disciplinary gazes once exercised from colonial overseers’ watchtowers on plantations. Likewise, AI workforce management software that atomizes physical labor into ceaseless data streams of trackable micro-tasks seems to embody the demand for ever-greater extraction of surplus value animating industrial capitalism.

Do such examples represent the vanguard of a systemic regression to new digital forms of bondage? Not necessarily – to evaluate AI’s true potential for the region’s labor futures, we must resist analytical reductionism. Artificial intelligence, like prior emerging technologies, will manifest contingent impacts across contexts based on the particularities of its design, deployment and surrounding socio-political structures. Already, we see divergent AI applications harboring emancipatory possibilities.

Take Saudi Arabia’s vision of using AI-enabled skills mapping and career-pathing platforms to boost female participation in its diversifying labor market as part of Vision 2030’s economic goals. Here, rather than entrenching biases, AI is positioned as a lever to promote inclusive growth by circumventing culturally regressive hiring norms. Similar arguments are made for AI enhancing formalization, mobility and bargaining rights for informal sector workers dominant across the MENA region who have historically existed in economic and legal precarity.

Ultimately, Crawford’s historicist framing reveals AI’s intrinsic malleability as both a vector of control and empowerment vis-a-vis labor. As an assemblage of capitalist origins, AI will tend towards being an exploitative tool in the absence of concerted ethico-political interventions. Yet conscious efforts to institutionalize equitable AI governance, data sovereignty and worker advocacy can recode its trajectory towards more liberating ends.

For the Middle East, grappling with AI’s impacts on labor means directly confronting its colonial-capitalist legacy and persisting structural inequities. Rather than uncritically imbibing fantasies of AI-driven efficiencies at any social cost, the region’s policymakers and moral voices must foster democratic, inclusive dialogues on AI’s role. Blind adoption of AI systems from monolithic Western corporations risks further entrenching labor hierarchies, enclosures and dependencies. Only by centering principles of economic justice and labor empowerment can the region’s rich history be counterweighted against AI’s tendency to resurface its darkest echoes.

In mapping AI’s expanding footprint in the present, Crawford’s work reminds us that technology’s impacts on labor are never ahistorical. The Middle East’s turbulent encounter with AI represents a pivotal node where historical ghosts and futurist ambitions intersect. How its societies navigate this juncture will be a crucial determinant of whether AI emerges as an emancipatory force or another incarnation of subjugation for the region’s masses of workers.