Solarpunk, Liberation Theology, and the Future of the Global South 

Recently, I attended a talk by an employee of a major AI company about work they were doing with the island nation of Tuvalu to help Tuvalu become the world’s “first digital nation.” Because of its extremely low elevation (4.6 m or ~15 ft at highest elevation), the island nation has been quite vocal about climate change-induced sea level rise and its impact on their land. For example, one of the videos shown during the talk was of an island chief standing in ocean water, pleading for the world to act on mitigating climate change.

Tuvalu has a long way to go before it becomes a digital nation, however. During the talk, we learned that the island nation currently does not even use digital spreadsheets, and data is entered into spreadsheets by government employees by hand on ruler-drawn paper. The Internet is available on the islands but only at certain times of the day and it is mostly used for entertainment.

Another challenge is that most of the people of Tuvalu don’t see the need to update to the latest technology. When casually asked about AI by employees of the partner company, many of them just responded, “What is the point?”  This is not to say that there was no interest in AI. After all, the Tuvaluan government is working with U.S. tech companies to digitize the nation. The local attitude toward AI, however, is a largely practical one. Tuvaluans want to use AI to improve government administration, education, and the quality of life on the islands. AI and other digital tech do not seem to be transforming their everyday lives in the same way that it is in the United States. For example, Tuvaluans still have most of their conversations with humans and generate their own written content without outsourcing it to AI.

The focus on AI for human development in Tuvalu is common, though not uniform, across the Global South, including in Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. At a related event, I talked to a former tech worker from Silicon Valley who now builds houses in Puerto Rico. When I asked them about how they saw the adoption of emerging technologies in Puerto Rico and where it would go, they responded that technology like AI is largely behind the scenes. Human relationships are in the foreground, while the Internet (being used to answer homework questions or for enjoying TikTok before bed) is in the background.

The increasingly dominant narrative in contemporary Western and other Global North conversations around tech is that technological development will lead to increasing alienation as large corporations and authoritarian governments use advanced digital technology to surveil their citizens and keep them distracted. This is also seen as a prelude to the emergence of posthuman superintelligences that will enslave or wipe out humanity. This vision of the future is described in the cyberpunk science fiction genre. 

A counter-narrative to grim cyberpunk scenarios is the solarpunk genre, where technology–such as robotics, cybernetics, and biotechnology–is used in a way that integrates humans with each other and nature. Cities are decked with vegetation and powered by renewable energy, and robots are used to free humans of repetitive labor so they can spend more time building relationships, creating art, and being in nature. Another feature of solarpunk fiction is that advanced technology is behind the scenes. The environment tends to look fairly low tech, despite being potentially much more advanced than the modern day. For example, it might look indistinguishable from a rural village apart from the massive solar panels or the humanoid robot walking by. Examples of this genre include Becky Chambers’s novels Psalm for the Wild-Built, Prayer of the Crown Shy, and Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. 

This raises an interesting question. Could a solarpunk-like scenario emerge from the Global South? Currently, the vast majority of AI development is done in the Global North and in countries like China, but it is also not clear how long this rapid development is sustainable with the increasing need for data centers and its strain on both water supplies and critical mineral supplies. 

If Global North economies were to hit the infrastructural and supply chain limits of AI development, strategic social activism could force a shift to a slower development of AI focused on artificial narrow intelligence or narrow AI. Narrow AI is trained for specific tasks, like drug discovery or environmental monitoring. These smaller, task specific models are more likely to provide direct benefits to people while being more environmentally sustainable and without the risk of replacing or wiping out humanity, as is the case with artificial general intelligence (AGI). Focus on narrow AI for specific beneficial tasks would also be resistance to the current race for AGI happening among a few U.S. companies and possibly between the United States. and China. 

Currently, the part of the world most likely to focus on narrow AI is the European Union with its AI regulatory regime. The EU has been criticized by AI advocates in the United States as being too slow. While the European approach has its shortcomings, it is an example of an AI regulatory regime that has the potential to develop AI in a way that still is safe and benefits humanity and the planet. 

This may also be a viable path for countries of the Global South. European AI development is currently dependent on U.S. Big Tech in critical ways because most of the European AI applications are dependent on U.S. models and cloud infrastructure. On the other hand, much of the Global South is yet to develop AI infrastructure. This may provide fertile ground for developing models from scratch that represent a resistance to AI capitalism driving the development of U.S. and Chinese models. I talked to at least one group doing this in Lebanon. 

Despite their potential usefulness and the likely sincerity of the good intentions of their creators (at least in the case of Anthropic), centralized U.S. models like chatGPT or Claude are trained to produce capital for investors, not to benefit humanity or the planet. A coordination of smaller models built around specific social needs rather than profit, and owned by communities or by a network of smaller socially-oriented companies, or perhaps individually owned, might be a way to create an AI-powered future that also resists capitalism. This would of course require a specific set of values to be trained into such models. This is where religions common in the Global South, such as Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, could play a role.

Although other religions have resources for developing counternarratives to AI capitalism, my background is in Christianity, so I will focus there. The recent papal encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and liberation theology are specific examples of theological roadmaps to provide motivation for an alternative, liberatory pathway for technological development. Liberation theology has inspired revolutionary movements in Latin America, such as the early Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Interestingly enough, there have also been attempts to develop a liberation theology specific to the Pacific Islands, which is directly relevant to the predominantly Christian nation of Tuvalu. 

Could liberation theology inspire a similar revolutionary movement in the realm of technological development where oppressed and marginalized people are able to use technology to improve their situation? Technology that works for integral human liberation where each community implements technology enabling their own liberation would be consistent with the pope’s vision of communities working together to each build their own section of the walls of Jerusalem.

Image: ssr ist4u from Flickr, via Wikimedia