Abstract

Excerpted From: Chaz Arnett, Dystopian Dreams, Utopian Nightmares: AI and the Permanence of Racism, 112 Georgetown Law Journal 1299 (June, 2024) (325 Footnotes) (Full Document)

There is a scene in Marlon James's novel Black Leopard, Red Wolf where the main character, Tracker, comes upon a startling discovery. While on an adventurous journey with a small band of friends to save a child, whose fate may alter the world, they go to a seemingly marvelous and technologically advanced queendom, Dolingo. Upon arrival, members of the group watch in awe as levers and pulleys operating various modes of transportation all seem to work on their own. When they reach their accommodations, the doors open automatically. When they go to sit down, chairs slide over for them to sit, and tables move accordingly. It is the most advanced society they have ever encountered. They even begin to joke about how the presence of this utopia could only be explained by some form of magic. However, after spending a day there, Tracker begins to question why he has never seen any children, or even any slaves like in all the other kingdoms in the North and South. While in his room, Tracker smells what he believes to be a person sweating behind one of the walls. He and his friend begin tearing at the wall to open it. What they discovered nearly floored them. Behind the wall was a young boy who had his mouth stuffed, and “[e]very limb--legs, feet, toes, arms, hands, neck, and each finger--was tied to, and pulled, a rope.” It was never magic that made everything move, but rather an army of child slaves hidden behind the walls and beneath the floorboards. While trying to figure out what to do with the child who likely spent most, if not all, their days behind the walls, the child escaped and leapt from the balcony to his death.

As I watched video clips from the United Nations “AI for Good” Global Summit in Geneva, Switzerland, in July 2023, I could not help but think about Tracker and the Dolingo magic. Nine generative AI-powered humanoid robots stood over an interview table at the press conference ready to answer questions. As journalists proceeded to ask the robots very serious questions, like how to solve global poverty and inequality, while being dazzled and delighted by the robots' presumed ability to respond on their own, it seemed as if something was missing. At a time when many countries around the world were engaged in critical debates about the best ways to regulate current and emerging AI technologies, lining up robots in wigs and individual outfits appeared misguided, if not flippant, considering the U.N.'s hefty aim of reaching its sustainable development goals. Even more, there was no significant discussion of how generative AI cannot work without the labor of thousands of often exploited and hidden workers nor of how human biases in design and development continue to plague the deployment of generative AI technology.

Watching those robots reminded me of an epiphany I recently had one evening while catching up on the last season of HBO's Westworld. Several months had gone by since the season aired, and I was anxious to see how it all ended. The premise of the show is that we are in a not-so-distant future where humans have figured out how to create AI robots, called “Hosts,” that are so well made that it is hard to tell who is human or not. These Hosts are made to do and indulge in whatever humans desire, leading to them being subjected to violence, sexual exploitation, and all other sorts of deviant manipulation. To secure this twisted arrangement, the Hosts are prevented from harming humans or even fully grasping what is happening to them. There is a corporation, Delos, that creates a sort of theme park, Westworld, where the wealthy can pay to have free reign over these Hosts in a staged environment modeled after the old American West. The early storyline begins with one of the original engineers for Delos providing an update to the system of these robots, which allows them to become fully sentient beings, free to retaliate. Everything slowly unwinds and explodes from there, leading to an all-out war between humans and Hosts in the ensuing seasons, setting up the last season where the roles are completely reversed--the Hosts run the world and the humans do their bidding.

In one of the final episodes that I binge watched that evening, there was a scene where one of the main characters, William, who became a notoriously violent and obsessed guest within the theme park, is confronted by a Host that is made in his identical image. The Host William says to the real William, “I'm not you.” The real William replies, “Well, you might as well be. You can't fix a few millennia of broken DNA with a ... hard drive.” Host William answers, “You're right.” The real William smugly notes:

Of course, I am. Civilization is just the lie we tell ourselves to justify our real purpose. We are not here to transcend. We are here to destroy .... You have a piece of me inside of you, and its spreading like a cancer. You can feel it running through your veins, infecting your mind, why you want answers from me .... [Y]ou are me.

At the time I reacted like the now infamous meme of Leonardo DiCaprio, taken from the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where he excitedly leans forward out of his seat to point at the television screen. For years I had been watching Westworld, knowing that there was something drawing me to it, but I could never articulate the reason. That exchange revealed for me the overlap between my sci-fi interests and my academic pursuits as a race, technology, and privacy scholar. The show articulated one of the central claims in the field of critical race and digital studies: that technology is sociocultural, often encoding points of bias, such as race, and reproducing existing inequities. Thus, its critique of the idea that a technology could be developed in a way that is not shaped by those that design, develop, and deploy it resonated deeply.

The focus on inescapable, destructive desire and action upon the backdrop of a future with advanced technological change immediately made me think of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, the first book in Butler's Parable series, and Derrick Bell's Faces at the Bottom of The Well: The Permanence of Racism. In Butler's book, her central character, Lauren Olamina, finds herself in a future chaotic world in which she has little control: a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles consumed with violence, inequality, powerful drugs, and new exploitative technologies. To make sense of it, she develops a new spiritual philosophy, Earthseed, that centers on the one truth: “All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you.” The irony is that while her world continues to change, the one thing that does in fact remain the same is humanity's drive for differentiation and destruction. In Derrick Bell's book, through a series of creative essays, he highlights how race has found ways to remain despite all the other changes--“racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.” Thus, even when the contours of race shift and reassemble, like a Rubik's Cube, the core remains unscathed. The connection of Bell's work to Parable of the Sower and Westworld is particularly salient in his chapter The Space Traders. Originally published in 1992, The Space Traders is set in the future in the year 2000, when extraterrestrial life forms visit Earth and propose a trade to the United States: hand over all of America's Black population in exchange for wealth and advanced technology. Like the Parable series, The Space Traders takes readers on a journey where the Black central character wrestles with a future where past vows toward equality and justice have gone unfulfilled, technology betrays progress, and the suffering of the most vulnerable deepens to satisfy the thirst for privilege of others.

Parable of the Sower and The Space Traders are Afrofuturistic literary works. Afrofuturism challenges mainstream depictions of sci-fi futures devoid of Black life by not only declaring the presence of Black people but also situating them as beautiful architects and visionary developers of the future. Yet Afrofuturistic literature, art, and media are just as dedicated to their political messaging as they are to aesthetic contributions. Afrofuturism is often a vehicle for challenging current circumstances, elevating the importance of past histories' impact on the future, exploring science and technology as conduits for both power and peril, and leveraging the Black imaginary to inspire toward and construct liberatory futures. As Lisa Yaszek notes:

[Afrofuturistic historical recovery projects] demonstrate how Africanslaves and their descendants experienced conditions of homelessness, alienation, and dislocation that anticipate what philosophers like Nietzsche describe as the founding conditions of modernity. Thus, Afrodiasporic histories insist both on the authenticity of the black subject's experience in Western history and the way this experience embodies the dislocation felt by many modern peoples.

Although Afrofuturism was coined in the 1990s, work as early as the midnineteenth century has used looking forward as a way to navigate and understand current realities of race in America. Yet, in recent years, we have witnessed an expansion in art, media, and literature in this genre. While Westworld would not be considered an Afrofuturistic show, as noted earlier, its heavy use of racial justice themes and imagery in examining the impact of technological change in the future certainly puts it in conversation with such works. For example, the dehumanization, exploitation, and acts of resistance and rebellion by the Hosts map onto slave narratives in North and South America. The fashioning of Hosts as property devoid of feeling or experiencing pain echoes enduring myths from enslavement that Black people hold higher tolerance levels for pain. Even more, three of the show's most important and powerful formerly enslaved Hosts--Maeve, Bernard, and Charlotte--are portrayed by Black actors, aligning many of the overarching concepts connected to race to direct visual cues. is particularly important because it is within the realm of new media, like Netflix's Black Mirror, that takes on the dystopian aspects of the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI)--a level where AI systems can wield beyond-human intelligence, operate autonomously in dynamic environments, and tackle complex issues without the need for human input or assistance.

Literature, television, and film have always been powerful tools for examining current and future social dilemmas and exploring perceptions of justice. These mediums often influence one another as well. A few years after The Space Traders was published, its film adaptation, Cosmic Slop, aired on television. A film based on Parable of the Sower is currently in production, and HBO's Westworld television series is a revival and adaptation of a 1973 film by the same name. The uniqueness and resurgent appeal of Afrofuturistic content and concepts, particularly in literature, film, and art, are overwhelmingly evident. Yet Afrofuturism's theoretical value as a vehicle for understanding the challenges with advancing technologies, surfacing the impact on marginalized communities, exploring themes in fiction that have real world corollaries, and visioning new ways to persist and resist may be more understated. Additionally, Afrofuturism's past and current contributions to law are overshadowed.

Literature, television, and film have had reciprocal effects on law and policy, as noted in scholarship drawing connections between law and literature, and law and film. Central to the law's influence and legitimacy, as observed in case opinions, litigation strategy, and policymaking, is the power of narrative. As Bennett Capers notes, Afrofuturism is similarly “grounded in storytelling.” Thus an Afrofuturistic lens is an apt conduit for examining the relationship between race, technology, and the law. But more importantly, Afrofuturism is a critical framework for interrogating the stories that we tell ourselves about the social problems we seek to address through law and imagining different directions and possibilities.

When comparing and analyzing Westworld alongside Parable of the Sower and The Space Traders, one notable theme, common in Afrofuturistic work, emerges: the promise of utopia. The promise of utopia refers to how all three have elements of an ideal place for safety, comfort, and pleasure, which drive the main characters and their understanding of their worlds. However, these works, through incredible storytelling, satire, and vivid imagery, carefully demystify and deconstruct the idea of utopia. With great cynicism they reveal not only that promises of utopia are always illusory, but also, more dangerously, that utopian pursuits and appeals act to cloak more dystopian realities. It is often the attempts *1308 by the more privileged in society to build utopian dreams that forcefully trap those on the margins of society in dystopian nightmares.

The remainder of this Essay explores the promise of utopia theme in the context of one of the most popular technological changes and innovations of our time, the emergence of generative AI, which has benefitted tremendously from utopian hype and promise, to the detriment of serious examination of its current and potential harms. Part I highlights utopian themes found in the Parable series, The Space Traders, and Westworld, and reflects on how some of these themes can be identified in the mainstream narratives about the potential of generative AI. As a contrast, Part I also explores how these works brilliantly uncover dystopias lurking behind the veneer of utopian progress, and how their approach could be useful in elevating the dystopic aspects of AI despite intense marketing and political subterfuge. Part II proposes four values--Ustopia, Sankofa, Data Justice, and Data Power--that should act as a guide as we wrestle with what the utopian/dystopian dichotomy may mean for current regulation and future law and advocacy concerning AI.

[. . .]

The image at the end of The Space Traders continues to haunt me, like unrelenting ghosts. Under the watchful eyes of armed guards, twenty million Black people, stripped down to a single undergarment and in chains, are led upon alien ships at the beach, headed to a distant new world. The connections to the selling and shipping of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade are overwhelming. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the ending scene is that we are left to wonder what the future holds for them. Similar questions linger for Westworld and the Parable series. Is the sublime virtual world, where Hosts upload their conscious with the hopes of eternal bliss, truly an escape if its functioning still depends on the material world's physical space and energy? In the Parable series, could the Earthseed community ever overcome their initial struggles on a new planet?

Perhaps the point is not being able to overcome the worst tendencies of humankind but figuring out the best ways to exist in the most meaningful, healthy ways possible despite them. While The Space Traders' ending is horrifying, it is unfortunately a familiar experience. The sordid history of Black people being captured and taken to new worlds by alien people on ships-- and somehow still surviving, somehow continuing to still dream upon the backdrop of the fiercest of nightmares--in some ways lets us know that they will be okay and that they hold the power to transform and impact the new worlds they will arrive to. And maybe there is a lesson there for how we think about AI's future: if the reality is one where inherent destructive forces bent on generating differentiation, like race, to empower extraction and exploitation will always exist, then perhaps the aim is continual efforts to survive and resist by any and all means available, radical and imaginative.

I still wonder what it would have meant to follow Professor Golightly's request, even at the cost of integrity, and how that would translate into legal advocacy in AI regulation. What would advocacy look like when people who have the most to lose have their backs up against the wall and “people must use cunning and guile”? Although Derrick Bell's prognosis of the permanence of racism still rings true thirty years later, it is hard to imagine what racism could look like 1,000 years or 3,000 years in the future. Yet through all the iterations of racist structures, systems, and technologies, there always remained the drive to look and reach forward. Thus, maybe the focal point should be on the permanence of Black dreams, and the permanence of Black futures, instead of the permanence of racism. Only time will tell what role generative AI and similar forthcoming technologies will play in reaching those futures. What is clear, however, is that Afrofuturistic imagining and critique will be pivotal in interrogating both the hopeful and depressing stories we tell ourselves about technology and its promises, and subsequently about ourselves and our own promise as humans.

Professor of Law, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. © 2024, Chaz Arnett.