Break the Digital Monoculture

Jason Edward Lewis is a digital media theorist, poet, and software designer. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he conducts research/creation projects exploring computation as a creative and cultural material. Lewis is deeply committed to developing intriguing new forms of expression by working on conceptual, critical, creative and technical levels simultaneously. He is the University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary as well Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University, Montreal. Born and raised in northern California, Lewis is Hawaiian and Samoan.

Read more on his work here.

How did you come to work at the intersection of digital media, artificial intelligence, art and popular culture, future thinking, and Indigenous Studies?

I loved programming and I felt that programming was another writing practice, like poetry, which is my foundational  artistic practice. When I began working in Silicon Valley we were still very excited about the emancipatory possibilities of technology, as the tech work was seasoned with a healthy dose of  Northern California hippie. It was techno hippie optimism before it curdled into the Silicon Valley that we know today. But as I got older, I began recognizing the fact that I was one of the only brown bodies in most of these rooms.

I am Hawaiian and Samoan, but I was adopted when I was six months old, and raised in Northern California in a rural mountain county. So when I got to my undergrad at Stanford, it was the first time I got pulled into a community of brown and Indigenous folks, and they made a home for me. Then, much later, I met my wife, Skawennati, a Mohawk woman from Kahnawake outside of Montreal. She had been thinking about this question of what it means to be Indigenous in virtual space. 

Our interests resonated with each other and we started Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) to increase the number of Indigenous Peoples working with digital tools. AbTeC does workshops on Aboriginal storytelling, Digital Media Design, video games, and animation. We support Indigenous artists through residencies so they can learn how to use digital tools and feed a discourse that recognizes the digital capabilities that we have in our communities.

When I saw AI starting to bubble up for a third time I felt much better equipped to think critically about these technologies. I and others knew that there were going to be huge problems here. The kind of the core statistical approach of machine learning meant, almost by definition, that smaller populations were going to get fucked. I started talking to some of my colleagues, who were interested in Indigenous practices, protocols, and technology. Together we wrote the essay “Making Kin with the Machines,” (co-authored with Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite.) It is around this time that I realised, through these conversations and previous work, that we needed to understand how these new entities might fit within an Indigenous cosmology. And that such engagement was needed now, because what's being done with the technology is just rotten to the core. 

So, at this moment, June 2021, my main research question is how we go about prototyping AI, or AI-like systems, from a foundation of Indigenous epistemology. How do we capture that epistemology in partnership with communities who are interested in AI systems? And how do we formalize that, so that we can make it computable in a way that doesn't do violence to those epistemologies?

And what do you believe is the main challenge of AI?

A special issue of Journal of Artificial General Intelligence from 2019 featured a definition of intelligence. The following issue featured 20 responses. And it was really depressing to read because they all conceptualised intelligence in the same way. They took it as a given that intelligence means – and this is my abbreviation – rational self-serving goal seeking. It really brought home how captured we have become by a knowledge framework that is the product of the post enlightenment, utilitarian, and monotheistic way of looking at the world.

I'm a technologist, so when I watch this happen in the technological domain or dimension, I ask what we can do to counter this. This is not just coming from an Indigenous perspective, because we know that there's tons of research on multiple intelligences from within the Western tradition itself. To build technologies that reinforce just one view of intelligence is just a bad idea in general. But for small populations, like Indigenous populations are, it's potentially deadly. 

One of the greatest tricks the computer science field ever pulled was using the term ‘science’. They're not scientists. They're not even engineers, really, because they don't have the rigour that professional engineers have. They don't have the sense of responsibility that comes along with a standard engineering education. They're in this weird free-for-all area. It's comical, but also tragic. It's tragic, because it's having enormous real world consequences for the rest of us. And it's being built by a group of people who still to this day – no matter how many AI ethics pledges they might sign – are operating in a fundamentally unethical manner.

What is it we can learn from Indigenous knowledge systems? 

So I think there's a couple things that are important. First of all is that there are other ways of engaging with the world. We've been trying to tell you this for centuries, and only now you have started to listen. You have previously actively suppressed our knowledge and punished us for expressing these thoughts; thoughts like humans being in meaningful reciprocal and respectful relationships with non-humans. 

This is something that our epistemologies, cosmologies, ontologies, and language systems retain. So part of what we are doing is to say “Here are some examples of looking at our relationship to technology differently . Don't appropriate them. Don't just cherry pick and expropriate them. Rather, use them to understand that we as humans have ways of relating better to non-sentient beings. And we can do it with this technology.”

Our knowledge has been treated as superstition, religion, or spirituality. But  it is knowledge about this world; knowledge which has been useful in our cultures for a very long time. There's so much ignorance and incompetence around dealing with non-human creatures, because we live in a dominant culture whose main religious text basically says that man is the height and centre of creation.

And how does kinship become important here in relation to AI?

This is a challenging discussion within the Indigenous communities because people have such different kinship practices. Some are not interested in having AI as kin. Others will argue that because AI is drawn from the materials of this world, we must  have a kinship relationship. Our question is then, how do we recognize and maintain that relationship? That's where protocols come in because Indigenous protocols show us the proper way of going about making  and maintaining kinship.

And you know when and if AI has the ‘Great Awakening,’ I want it to wake up and look around and think, ‘these people are pretty okay and that they have treated me well.’ We really need to get out of the idea that AI is gonna wake up and hate us. One way to do this is to not treat it as a servant from the beginning.

In changing this narrative, how does aesthetics and popular culture become crucial?  

I don't know how you can imagine the future without activating the people in your community or in your society that have the most active imaginations: artists. You know it's bonkers to me that you have foresight and future casting consultancies which almost never include artists in their core team. They might pop an artist in every now and then to draw some pictures from the notes, but they don't treat artists as primary resources for imagining what the future might be like.

In my network many of us are artists and we believe in the power of art to open up our minds. The Initiative for Indigenous Futures is all about, how do we use art so that people in the communities we work with can imagine better futures for themselves? Plus, few of the people we normally work with are going to read an academic paper. So the standard academic ways of trying to tackle something like this are not useful tools on their own

Art is absolutely essential, I think, to mobilize people outside of academia, to think about these important concepts. And to shed assumptions as much as possible that we don’t really need to care about non-humans.  

Could you take one example of an artwork or a game that you find very inspiring to counter this digital monoculture?

There are so many, but one of the ones I like the most is The Peacemaker Returns (2017) by the artist Skawnnati. That video  is about  The Great Peacemaker, who lived some time in the 1100s and who brought The Great Law of Peace to what is now the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to convince the  five warring nations to live together peacefully. The video recounts the events from  that time period, and then  reimagines it into the present day  where those teachings are used to unite the different nations of Earth.

For the final third of the video, Skawennati imagines a future wherein those teachings are used to unite five intergalactic species, both human and alien. I really appreciate how the artwork  considers practices developed a long time ago and applies them to the present to figure out how we can use them now--and in the future

I think that's a really good example of how the future for the communities we work with is tied to the past. That sets the work that we do apart from standard science fiction because it's a very clear acknowledgement that we are working from foundations laid down by our ancestors. We're interested in bringing our ancestors along with us, because they still have so much to teach us.