ai regulation

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming a structuring force in contemporary life. From scientific research and public administration to everyday communication and self-understanding, AI systems shape how we act, decide, and relate to one another. Yet their rapid diffusion raises urgent philosophical and political questions: What kind of progress does AI promise and for whom? How do algorithmic systems transform responsibility, agency, and justice? Who is likely to suffer from the watchful eye of AI systems? Can democratic societies meaningfully govern technologies that increasingly govern them?

This semester of Taming the Machines explores these questions from interdisciplinary perspectives in philosophy, political theory, and science and technology studies. We invite you to reflect with us on AI as a site of power and normativity, and examine its role in economic and political ordering, surveillance and security, knowledge production, and the formation of subjectivity. And also to considers more intimate dimensions, such has how interactions with such systems might reshape self-knowledge, dialogue, creativity, and even solitude.

This paper develops the concept of uneven datafication, drawing on literature on coloniality, uneven development, and dependency theory. Uneven datafication refers to uneven development in the contemporary political economy of data, showing how global cycles of differentiation and totalisation perpetuate inequality to sustain capitalist structures. Datafication is neither homogeneous nor universal, but marked by colonial continuities, spatial differentiation, and temporal unevenness. Uneven datafication operates through three interrelated dynamics. First, territorialisation,  deterritorialisation, and reterritorialisation produce uneven geographies of digital colonial capitalism, from datafied bodies to platform infrastructures and space-based data centres. Second, dispossession enacts spatial, temporal, and dehumanising violence, ranking populations as more or less valuable and enforcing biopower ‘within’ and necropower ‘beyond’. Third, unequal exchange sustains asymmetrical valuation and circulation of data and data labour, enabling Big Tech and core economies to extract surplus value from peripheral regions.
Uneven datafication thus sustains colonial capitalist accumulation through differentiated dispossession and dependency across populations, spaces, and classes.