https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i4.082
Towards a Future of AI: Analysing the Data as the Power Centre for Identities and Their Positioning in the Selected Feminist Future Narratives
PRITHIGA G
PhD Research Scholar
Pondicherry University, India
Email: prithicoco@pondiuni.ac.in
Abstract: A most contestable debate in the world of Artificial Intelligence concerns embedded data and algorithmic bias. This contemporary debate on embedded data and AI as a systemic tool underpins this paper’s argument. How feminist futures interpret the dematerialised information, called data, is not just a property of AI and algorithms but also an active reality automator, a generated sociotechnological construct. The aim is to qualitatively analyse how AI can be weaponised to simulate social reality. A process through which it acts as an epistemic authority and a power centre that generates rationales for control, surveillance, and the automation of the entirety of the human and non-human. Studies on political identities and feminist epistemology highlighted the need to address the potential vacancy in documenting the lived experiences of women and the marginalised communities. Likewise, Donna Haraway’s theory of ‘Cyborg’ and ‘Situated Knowledge’ is the ideological and political framework that emphasises cyborg politics as a destabilising process of subverting power centres. By incorporating these contemporary theoretical lenses, the study textually analyses the selected future narratives of Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Analog/Virtual and Other Simulations of Your Future (2020) and S.B Divya’s Machinehood (2021). To explore the prediction and projection of AI’s weaponisation and its embedded data as a cause. Thereby, the narratives decode underlying structural hierarchies such as patriarchy, capitalism and technocracy and their induced technological terrorism, which in turn reiterates discrimination and marginalisation. Findings highlight the knower/known dynamics and identity politics, and their positionings as key aspects that build on AI models and their embedded data to reinforce social inequalities, double marginalisation and political disadvantages. Specifically, this analytical reflection on Indian feminist futures and the context of a third-world country experiencing technological outburst identifies and proposes a potential space for academic discussion within feminist discourses and epistemological reimaginations to explicate feminist narratives.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Data, Feminist Future, Cyborg Identity, Marginality, Positioning, and Situated Knowledge
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