The Not-Yet-ness of AI: Unsettling the Global AI Moment from Africa

Abstract

Whether by advocates or critics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly talked about as if it were a thing that acts upon us. This article confronts the framing of the current global AI moment in Africa as ‘immediate future’, defending an alternative posture that resists totalising and urgent assumptions, and instead slows down and situates empirical inquiry in the everyday material and ideational making of ‘AI’. Eastern Africa, we propose, is one valuably generative place in the world from which to trouble the ‘thingness’ of AI. Here, global AI disjunctures are sharply visible: the proximity of utopian promise to well-precedented extraction; the simultaneity of high-tech spectacle and mundane labour; the collision of hegemonic narratives with grounded, fragmented and diverse actualities. We advance four provocations for how scholars researching in Africa can help rethink AI: stay with its ‘not-yet-ness’; de-centre AI when studying AI; do not presume AI’s stable facticity; and be reflexive about Big Tech’s hold on the AI research agenda. Central is the call to embrace ‘not-yet-ness’ against AI as a reified, irresistible ‘thing’, the ‘immediate future’ that is and must be: a stance that inhabits AI’s disjunctures and contradictions, and opens AI to study as dynamic, plural and contestable.