In Barcelona particularly, bodily remnants of this previous abound. The town is thought for its Catalan modernism, an iconic aesthetic popularized by Antoni Gaudí, the mastermind behind the Sagrada Familia. The architectural motion was born partly from the investments of rich Spanish households who amassed riches from their colonial companies and funneled the cash into lavish mansions.
Probably the most well-known, often called the Casa Lleó Morera, was constructed early within the twentieth century with earnings constructed from the sugar commerce in Puerto Rico. Whereas vacationers from world wide at the moment go to the mansion for its magnificence, Puerto Rico nonetheless suffers from meals insecurity as a result of for therefore lengthy its fertile land produced money crops for Spanish retailers as a substitute of sustenance for the native individuals.
As we stood in entrance of the intricately carved façade, which options flora, legendary creatures, and 4 ladies holding the 4 biggest innovations of the time (a lightbulb, a phone, a gramophone, and a digicam), I might see the parallels between this embodiment of colonial extraction and international AI improvement.
The AI business doesn’t search to seize land because the conquistadors of the Caribbean and Latin America did, however the identical need for revenue drives it to broaden its attain. The extra customers an organization can purchase for its merchandise, the extra topics it could actually have for its algorithms, and the extra sources—information—it could actually harvest from their actions, their actions, and even their our bodies.
Neither does the business nonetheless exploit labor by means of mass-scale slavery, which necessitated the propagation of racist beliefs that dehumanized complete populations. But it surely has developed new methods of exploiting low-cost and precarious labor, usually within the International South, formed by implicit concepts that such populations don’t want—or are much less deserving of—livable wages and financial stability.
