Horrara Moreira, a lawyer confronting the biases of technology: ‘The AI revolution can generate a kind of digital neocolonialism’
As a counterpoint to a perhaps dystopian future, this educator recommends concentrating on the little things that truly make up people’s lives and (at least for now) cannot be monetized or converted into data
When Horrara Moreira talks about artificial intelligence (AI), one of the first things she does is to curb people’s enthusiasm. In her talks she often makes fun of the images of shiny robots touching screens that are suspended in the air that Hollywood has created in the collective imagination: AI is not a magical, invisible cloud; rather, it takes up a lot of space, it needs huge amounts of energy and water to feed and cool data centers, and yes, it comes with many risks, just like firearms or the atomic bomb, two technologies that we have been living with for a long time.
Speaking from a coffee shop in Rio de Janeiro’s Tijuca neighborhood after the last throes of the Carnival, this lawyer, researcher and popular educator with a calm and affable voice says that she is a little uncomfortable with the end-of-the-world rhetoric associated with AI, yet at the same time she does not offer many reasons for optimism: she does not deny the concern caused by the concentration of the enormous power of AI in a handful of big techs in a couple of countries, or by regulation that always seems to be too little, too late.
She also worries that the AI revolution may end up generating a kind of digital neocolonialism, where large companies in the north extract raw materials from the south. She cites the case of misinformation on social media that encourages illegal mining in the Amazon region, an activity that extracts gold that ends up in the hands of the same companies that own these platforms, and with which they will possibly manufacture a new and more powerful new device.
“If you continue to be the one contributing basic supplies, such as water or minerals, into the AI chain, it is colonialism in another shape… we continue to offer the most basic elements because we have not developed the technology, we are not the owners of the technology,” she says. So what role do Brazil and Latin America have to play in this new world in transformation, if they want to be something more than mere spectators?
Moreira believes that, for Brazil, an alternative could come via the BRICS bloc, where countries such as China and India do have the expertise and resources that the tropical country lacks. But reducing reliance on American companies may mean discussing regulation with countries that do not have freedom of expression or human rights high on their agendas. It is a dilemma that Moreira leaves to the political class: “The global geopolitical game implies assuming that risk within everything that is offered on the table.”
While others decide how to safeguard their digital sovereignty in a world that is changing at the speed of light, Moreira does not lose sight of the threat of new technologies in perpetuating historical discrimination. Under the pretext of strengthening public security, Brazil is experiencing a boom in facial recognition and technological surveillance tools (there are already 351 projects underway and almost 82 million people potentially under surveillance, according to data from O Panóptico). Activists like Moreira, who coordinated the campaign Tire seu rosto da sua mira, consider it not only an attack on the right to privacy, but a “continuation of scientific racism” due to the constant identification errors that affect mainly Black people.
As a counterpoint to a perhaps dystopian future, Moreira says she wants to focus on the little things, on what really makes up people’s lives and which (at least for now) cannot be monetized or turned into data. She talks about ancestral technology: “Do you know how to make a child stop crying? That is cutting-edge technology for many people, without which no one can live […] Capitalism can collapse in many ways, but the microeconomy of care is continuous,” she says with conviction.
Another of her main goals is to put an end to the Cartesian idea, so deeply rooted in the West, that science is opposed to religion. A practicing follower of Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion originating in Rio de Janeiro, Moreira believes in Afrofuturism and in the possibilities of science for non-white peoples, who have resisted and endured outside the system: “It exists, and it is very effective, but it is codified in a different way.” For example, the offerings that devotees of religions originating in Africa make to Oxum, the orixá of fresh water, vanity and fertility, protector of pregnant women. Pregnant women often offer her (and also cook and eat) a type of beans that are very rich in folic acid, which has helped many pregnancies to come to a successful term since time immemorial: “Perhaps it is not codified in the Western way, but there is a very lively science there,” she says, smiling.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
