from Dori Tunstall on Decolonizing Design
[…] the underlying relational pattern of our contemporary technologies, especially as we move more towards artificial intelligences, is to find a way to maintain the extraction of labor that makes your life better, but to avoid paying any person or seeing any person or interacting with any person to provide those things. You would rather invest time and money to build a machine to do the things that people can do and have done efficiently and effectively (and to pay those people a minimum income instead), because you don’t actually want to deal with people. Or you know what you’re asking them to do is so demeaning and horrible and harmful that you want to escape the consequences of asking them to do these things, which means you don’t give a crap about your technology… […] wouldn’t it be interesting if we designed technologies that built relationships between people in the natural world and each other? What if relationality operated at the same level of efficiency as these systems of disintermediation that we’re building? And that, if you want to be innovative, seems much more worthwhile to put your energy into. That’s the real innovative challenge that we have. Making things work faster, we figured out that part. Can we make things work more justly and faster? That insertion of that value of justness, that insertion of that value of respectfulness, that will drive whole categories of innovation that we don’t even know how to imagine yet.
