In this episode, we talk to Sebastián Lehuedé, a Lecturer in Ethics, AI, and Society at King's College London. We talk about data activism in Chile, how water-intensive lithium extraction affects people living in the Atacama desert, the importance of reflexive research ethics, and an accidental Sunday afternoon shot of tequila.
Sebastián’s research focuses on the governance of digital technologies from a global social justice perspective. His current project, AI’s Nature, explores the connection between Artificial Intelligence and environmental justice. In this work, he has engaged with urban, peasant and Indigenous communities in Chile and Colombia mobilising against a data centre project, resisting lithium extraction and participating in AI-centred conservationist initiatives. His previous project, Scientific Data Colonialism, examined the governance of astronomy data in Chile. Sebastián’s approach combines ethnographic methods, political ecology and decolonial thought. He has also contributed to conceptual development on data friction, digital sovereignty and reflexivity in critical data studies.
READING LIST:
Lehuedé, S. (2024). An Elemental Ethics for Artificial Intelligence: Water as Resistance Within AI’s Value Chain. AI & Society.
Lehuedé, S. (2024). The Double Helix of Data Extraction: Radicalising Reflexivity in Critical Data Studies. Technology and Regulation.
Lehuedé, S. (2024). An Alternative Planetary Future? Digital Sovereignty Frameworks and the Decolonial Option. Big Data & Society.
Lehuedé, S. (2023). The Coloniality of Collaboration: Sources of Epistemic Obedience in Data-Intensive Astronomy in Chile. Information, Communication & Society.
Edward Said Memorial Lecture - Paul Gilroy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNvuyZ2ZTQ4
Gilroy, Paul (1995) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674076068
Woelfle-Erskine, Cleo. Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice. 2022. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 14, Number 2-3, 2008, pp. 191-215 (Article)
TRANSCRIPT:
Kerry:
Hi, I'm Dr. Kerry McInerney. Dr. Eleanor Drage and I are the hosts of the Good Robot podcast. Join us as we ask the experts, what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism help us work towards it? If you want to learn more about today's topic, head over to our website, www. thegoodrobot.co.uk, where we've got a full transcript of the episode and a sample. Especially curated reading list by every guest. We love hearing from listeners, so feel free to tweet or email us. And we'd also so appreciate you leaving us a review on the podcast app, but until then sit back, relax, and enjoy the episode.
Eleanor:
In this episode, we talk to Sebastián Lehuedé, a Lecturer in ethics, AI, and society at King's college London. We talk about data activism in Chile, how water-intensive lithium extraction affects people living in the Atacama desert, and an accidental Sunday afternoon shot of tequila. This episode is relatively academic, so just a heads up. We hope you enjoy the show.
Kerry:
So thank you so much for joining us today. We have known you for a good few years, but we've wanted to have you on the podcast for ages. It's so nice to finally be able to get together and record this. But just to kick us off, could you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do and what's brought you to thinking about gender, coloniality feminism and technology?
Sebastián:
Yes, sure. Thank you for the invitation. I'm a big fan of the good robot and of both of you in your research in your public engagement. So I feel I really appreciate the invitation. What took me to my research topic? I will say, from a personal perspective, two things. So one of them, I had a father who worked at IT. So since I was very little, he would bring me computers and things that I could explore, destroy and try out. So that was great. And on the other hand, I've also been very curious in terms of theory, politics. So I think at some point I realized, oh, I can actually analyze computers and technology from this more critical perspective.
And I think my research speaks to those two interests. The other thing is that I also do Latin American decolonial theory, which I think, um, started earlier, but I think after I started my studies in England I could see more clearly things that were not completely fine for me in terms of asymmetries, inequality especially within academia how, certain knowledges are considered more legitimate, and so on so that made me focus more on that aspect, I think.
Eleanor:
What does Latin American decolonial thought mean to you? Because there's lots of people listening that will think, Oh, I think I know what decolonial thought is, but probably not in the context of Latin America. So yeah, give us your two cents on that.
Sebastián:
I would say that the colonial theory, it's a theory that looks at how what we consider to be historical asymmetries or historical form of control through colonization, for example, still shapes the world today, basically. So even though most countries are already decolonized in South Africa, South America, in South America, it was like two centuries ago, still the world where we live was shaped by European colonialism in terms of The economy, how it works, what countries are rich, which ones are not, whose knowledge, uh, is valuable, whose knowledge is not, and so on.
So basically, I would say that the Latin American decolonial theory looks at how those asymmetries still shape world relations nowadays.
Eleanor:
Wonderful. So now can you help us answer our three good robot questions, which are: what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism help us get there? And perhaps you can think about these questions- because they are so massive- through your elemental ethics, you write about water. So how can we use water as a way of thinking ethically about what is good technology, that big question?
Sebastián:
Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I do talk about water in my research or about the elements more broadly, how, AI technologies or the cloud relies on water to operate. And we tend to forget about that. The reason why I'm using elemental ethics, which sometimes sounds a bit obscure or even mystical, is actually the opposite.
It's because I want to foreground that we have a specific relationship with our outside world, with water, fire, the elements, and so on and these technologies can actually affect that relationship. So I would say from a more elemental perspective, what good technology is, it could be technology that speaks to the way to the different ways in which people relates to the environment, to land, to territory, that doesn't impose one particular way in which territory is taken for granted or considered an asset. We hold different type of relations with water, with fire in our everyday life. So it's also about making technology speak to, yeah, our specific context, positionality, and so on without forgetting that we live in a world that's in crisis at the moment.
Whether there can be good technology. I definitely think so. I think we all from a more personal perspective. I think I do research because I care for technology. Otherwise, why doing this at all? So I do think that it's possible to have alternative technologies. There are cases I look at Latin America specifically.
There are uses of technology that encourage good land relations, for example, or acknowledge the fact that we co exist with the elements, I think is definitely possible.
So there are communities in Latin America that are fostering these positive ecological relationships between technology and and water or the environment?
Yeah, there are at different levels. So there are, for example, I don't know, indigenous communities working on telecommunication networks. Which basically is a way of not using all the kind of digital technologies which are tend to be a bit more and have a higher environmental impact. In my case, in particular, I've been looking at Ingenious communities affected by lithium extraction. So lithium is a component of rechargeable batteries.
I've been looking at Latin America and there you can find some communities that have been developing alternative technologies. For example, in Mexico, there are cases of communities building telecommunication networks based on completely different values like autonomy. We can discuss that also, by other values that are not extractive, for example, and so on. In my particular case, I've been working with two groups. One of them are data center activists, in the case I looked at, there was a community in Santiago, the capital of Chile, opposing the construction of a water intensive data center.
And also indigenous communities in the Atacama Desert affected by lithium extraction. And the extraction of lithium has really exploded since around 2014 with the development of electric vehicles. So lithium is a component of rechargeable batteries and its extraction in the Atacama Desert is extremely water intensive. So I've been looking at these communities, which maybe don't use terms such as AI, for example, in their activism, but to say we can actually take inspiration from them in order to rethink the way we design and govern or decide how to regulate technologies, for example.
So I think there are plenty of examples of where we can look at to have a more healthy relationship between technology lands, communities, and so on.
Kerry:
That's really fascinating. And I think it's really reflective of your broad portfolio of research in this area.
And I would have struggled to capture sort of the breadth of what you do before I heard you say that, but I guess this, the sense of relationality between technologies, communities, land, and power and how all those different layers of relationships are both created, but also can be undone or unpicked by technology- that is all really fascinating. And I do want to ask more about, Some of the specific work that you're doing on resource extraction specifically. But before we do that, you mentioned data center activism in Mexico. And I would love to know how you have approached this question of, and of environmental activism around data collection, also environmental activism around resource extraction across the Latin American continent.
Cause I think that there is, such an important story to be told in that kind of community activism.
Sebastián:
Now maybe as an overall context, I think the word extraction is very key if you come from Latin American critical theory, because the current world system is marked by extraction, right?
So we have a core basically that extracts raw materials from a periphery and adds value. That's like the broad kind of picture, we can go more into detail, but more or less that's how things look like when you study technology from not from the global North necessarily. In my case, I've been using that concept of extraction to think of, for example, our academic practices, how we approach our participants if we do field work, how we even approach theories, because we can be quite extractive with theories as well. If we are using, the decolonial theory, feminist theory, we are relying on knowledges of communities that have been developing concepts in their activism and we can use them to improve the power or to increase the power of global north institutions and academia, for example, which are already quite powerful.
But also in more concrete material terms, I'll be looking at how technologies such as AI or the cloud more broadly rely on the extraction of resources, which is something that. We, or some people sometimes forget they tend to present these technologies are quite abstract something that's very elevated.
But in practice if you have a smart speaker, which uses AI, that speaker requires minerals, requires water at different stages of the value chain. In my particular case when it comes to the study of the environmental impact of technologies, I think there are two kind of problems that I identified.
So one of them is that the discussion becomes extremely quantitative. Of course, we do need quantitative assessments of how much water these technologies are using, but. We should acknowledge that the fact that, for example, 1 liter of water in, I don't know England, where I am based now is not the same as 1 liter of water in the desert.
So we can have environmental reports by these companies, but we need a more fine grained understanding of what water means in different contexts. And the other problem, and this is unfortunately also present in some research by critical scholars, is that these communities or the communities affected are presented as only victims or subjects to this form of extraction.
But Scholars are not really looking at what these communities are saying in practice and how what they actually saying can inspire a different vision of technology. So i've been trying to do that to understand how can what these communities are doing and saying can inspire a different type of technology.
As I said before that's not easy because these groups sometimes don't use words such as artificial intelligence. They're not very knowledgeable on the technical dimension, but I think it's still valuable what they're saying and we should be incorporating it in discussions about governance design and so on.
Eleanor:
Yeah, absolutely. I really think that we should understand AI metonymically as a sum of its parts and The word AI can be such a red herring, such a misnomer when we're thinking about all the institutions and material objects that come together to create this thing that we call AI. So I'm really happy that you're looking at it that way.
Kerry:
Can I jump in just to ask very quickly? I think this is really fascinating and I can't wait to dive into it more. And you've mentioned, these are the words that often these communities aren't using. Artificial intelligence or some of the terms that have a lot of hype around them right now - certainly in the UK where Eleanor and I are based. But then what are they talking about? What kinds of words or ideas? Or values are really important to them when you're having these conversations about resource extraction.
Sebastián:
Yeah. I had the same question. For example, in some cases that will conduct interviews with these data center or lithium activists.
And then at the moment that the analysis, I will realize. that there were very important words being used. One of them was water, of course. So just to tell you a story. So when I did my field work with this data center group in Cerrillos, which is a community in Santiago, the capital of Chile At some point they invited me to a protest for the World Water Day and I was attending this protest and I was like, what am I doing here?
So I am a science and technology researcher, but I haven't heard about water in, in terms of theory or in the preparation that I got from academia. Water was something new to me, even though we all rely on water. So at that point, I started to ask more deeply about water because that's part of the vocabulary of these activist groups.
So also, they told me, for example, that they were concerned about the construction of this data center, but. And that they were aware that there were a lot of issues surrounding data, right? Privacy issues. I don't know all the kind of things, but they really wanted to focus on water strategically, because they thought that will resonate more with the concerns of the local community.
They told me like, talking about privacy is like talking about magic, or something, very obscure or abstract. Whereas talking about water is something that we all hold a relationship with. It's something that's going to mobilize our neighbors. And actually some of the data center activists, they do have a background in other kind of activism, environmental activism, mainly so I think what they really mobilize in their activism is more the environmental dimension, but not the environment that's something that has to be protected or something that's vulnerable, but rather something that we relate to in our everyday life that we depend on for our purposes, but also in the case, for example, of indigenous communities, because, as I said, lithium extraction is very water intensive, is a sacred element for them because they have managed to thrive in the desert, one of the driest deserts in the world, to a great extent because of their special relationship to water.
So how is that, lithium extraction is affecting that kind of relationship? I think it's yeah, their vocabulary, the vocabulary that you find has to do more with extraction. Water, sometimes environmental justice but not necessarily technology itself, because also data centers and electric vehicles are one concern, one issue for them.
That's, at the end of the value chain, but they also move between all different kinds of concerns. This is not the only ones that they're fighting for. Sometimes they don't have much time to engage thoroughly with one specific issue, like in this case, data centers.
So they have to move between different causes that they are defending.
Eleanor:
I'm really into water today because I accidentally had a shot of tequila yesterday on a Sunday afternoon because we moved table and the waiter was grateful. I'm so dehydrated today. But it's, it's really, it's interesting to think then, because there's many different kinds of batteries that are emerging to be more environmentally sustainable than lithium batteries, you've got flow batteries at Cambridge, we have lots of researchers trying to create less water intensive alternatives. So we're following those quite quickly, quite closely. The other thing I wanted to say was that because my academic background is queer theory and critical race theory, there's lots of water in those disciplines.
So I have many things for reading list, if anyone's interested- Paul Gilroy who's an amazing critical race theorist, talks about offshore humanism in the context of the slave trade. And there's lots of really, yeah, really interesting stuff from queer theory I can put in the chat as well, as an aside.
Okay the next thing we really want to ask is about data governance and autonomy. Or in my terrible GCSE Spanish, Autonomía. What is, to you, autonomy? Because it's something that, in feminist thought, we disagree about or have conflicting ideas about, because we try to emphasize not the autonomy of the human body per se, although that's important to remember in certain contexts, but the relations between things and autonomy has been mobilized in humanist thought for discriminatory ends.
So the autonomy of some people over others, et cetera, et cetera, who has the right to have the boundaries of their body respected. So that's some of the complexities that feminism has woven in to these debates about autonomy. But of course it is a really important word in relation to data governance.
So can you define autonomy for us? And can you tell us what its place is when thinking about the data governance of the future?
Sebastián:
Okay, no, that's a very good question. And I think I'm familiar to some extent with the concerns that you mentioned stemming from a feminist and queer theory, practice and so on. I think in my case, I'm drawing more on debates about governance and existing frameworks when it comes to kind of public bodies or communities.
So autonomía, the reason why I use autonomía and not autonomy is because autonomy as you mentioned, has its own trajectory in the West. So one of them comes from feminist discussions, but also in political theory and other places. Whereas autonomía is a term that is actually circulating in Latin American activism in order to high, in order to foreground the capacity that communities should have and do have in practice to self design their horizons, the way they're going to reach those horizons and so on.
And the idea is that they should be able to do that without any form of external imposition. So it's not autarky. It's not the same of, only reliant on yourself. Dependencies are acknowledged. We all depend on each other on networks and so on. But that doesn't mean that one particular actor should be able to impose their own will or vision on other ones.
So maybe the way for me, a good way of understanding autonomy is that the opposite of extraction. So extraction is. It's one actor deciding the terms and the conditions of everything and getting the benefits not considering local visions and so on. Autonomy is what you need in order to oppose extraction.
That's how I understand it. In relation to data governance, which was my previous research project, it came to me because at some point, I think when I was looking at the governance of astronomy data in Chile of scientific data I was looking at how the concerns of different groups involved or related somehow to this data.
So you might know, but Chile is the main source of terrestrial observation. There are observatories from the U. S., from Europe and other countries constructed in the country. And because these observatories are producing every time more and more data, many actors started to ask, what can we do with this data?
And then questions about governance also became relevant. But then I looked at the way discussions on governance were being, were circulating relating in the West. Most of them had to do with issues of ownership, access control, especially when it comes to open data sovereignty, and so on. But when I conducted my interviews and talked to different people ranging from scientists, policymakers, indigenous communities affected by the construction of these observatories, I realized that their concerns were very different.
They were concerned about extraction. Sorry that I bring this word again, but they would actually mention that word. How, for example, these observatories were extracting knowledge from the territory or actually resources and not leaving much in the country; concerns about territory or lands as is used in other contexts concerning for example, some of these observatory, one of these observatory was built on sacred indigenous lands without much consultation initially.
So the concerns were different and I found that autonomy in the way it circulates in Latin America was much more relevant to understand those concerns rather than open data or data sovereignty. So even though it might sound again a bit theoretical or strange, I think it actually makes sense when you want to acknowledge the needs ambitions of the local population.
And that's why I used that overall framework to discuss data governance.
Kerry:
It's really fascinating. And I think it's also really helpful for thinking about all the different kinds of tensions and different needs we have to grapple with when we're thinking about what it means to have good technology or what it means to have a more ethical future with AI.
And if that future should even include, AI at all, which is a question that we discuss quite a lot on this podcast and why we ask, is good technology even possible in the first place? And, I think the jury's still out on this one, but certainly concepts like autonomia or research processes like yours, which involve a lot of listening, a lot of grappling with what matters to people will certainly play a crucial role. But I wanted to bring us back to this question of doing research. You flagged this a little bit earlier in our conversation. And you also have a really fantastic piece on this called the double helix of data extraction, which is a really beautiful and important image. For our listeners, we have a reading list with every episode that you can find on our website, www.thegoodrobot.co.uk. And so all the pieces that we're mentioning will be on there and you can find them under the transcripts.
But I want to come to this piece because I found it really helpful both as a researcher, but also as an educator, as a teacher for talking to my students about what does it mean for us to do research well, because I think too often there can be this real sense of oh, the way that we can make change in the world as researchers is to research people who are really suffering, really marginalized, and to get as much data from these communities as possible to show the world what's happening.
And this can be really well intentioned, and this data can be really powerful, and yet that kind of process itself can be incredibly damaging and can reinforce some of the exact same problems that we're you know, we're trying to undo with research in the first place. I remember my husband used to run an NGO and he used to hate being researched by people, which was a whole part of his job as running this NGO, is people would come and want to write about his NGO and he'd have to house them and have them follow him around.
And, and this is and now as a researcher, he's Oh no, I'm the person that is following them around. And that this is unfortunately quite a common refrain I hear from people who work at different kinds of charity and non governmental organizations. So I wanted to ask you about, what is the double helix of data extraction?
How does this idea shape the way that you do your research? And what does this mean for researchers like us and you going forward? What kinds of changes do you want to see in how we do research?
Sebastián:
Yeah, I think I really liked your introduction really speaks to some of the things that I addressed in that article. Basically, I came up with this idea or these thoughts, after realizing that you know there's been this whole turn if you want in the study of data and technology where. We, social scientists, people from the humanities, are adopting increasingly critical approaches.
Some of them are, will be, for example, decoding of theory, in my case, Latin American decoding of theory, or it can be intersectional feminism, for example, in order to analyze both data and technology. That's super necessary, and it has already proven to be very relevant to foreground things that were, taken for granted or not really considered in the debate.
However that doesn't mean that those of us relying on those theories necessarily are not replicating the very phenomena that we are criticizing. And this is not new. It's been present for, it's been discussed for a very long time. I think especially from indigenous Communities who's being subject to research.
So research, the way we understand research, especially in the humanities and social sciences to a great extent started during colonialism, right? This idea of going abroad and observing other cultures and bringing that data home and I don't know, doing things with that information that would in the end support, the empire rather than those very communities that were subject to research.
So basically, in that article, I'm drawing on literature from, indigenous thought feminist theory as well, to argue that we have to be really reflexive in our own practices because we're relying on these critical theories, which, as I said earlier as well on the basis of specific struggles.
So the notion of extraction, for example, that we mentioned it throughout this episode. It comes from not from an academic who invented it, but rather from communities that are facing issues. So some sometimes we scholars tend to approach these kind of things in such an abstract way that not even the communities that coined those terms would understand what we're talking about.
So as long as we, use these terms in a way that completely ignore the context in which they emerged and the struggles that they were supporting. That will be a form of co optation because in the end is benefiting us, but not those very communities and the same with when we do empirical research.
So you're not only with a, that's not only have to do with theories, but also empirical research. Sometimes we don't go on field work ask, marginalized communities things and involve them in research. But then our final output doesn't necessarily benefit them in any way. It doesn't improve their situation at all.
So in the end, we, the three of us, for example, might have a very cool article published, talking about marginalized communities, and we can get, academic promotions, invitations to other places, but then the communities that we were conducting research on are in the same situation. And I think I thought that kind of reflection could be particularly important in relation to this term that I mentioned.
I analyzed my own research practices in that article with indigenous communities, the indigenous communities I was mentioning before, the Lickan Antay in the Atacama Desert, and how, for example, the priorities that I had at that time, I was doing my PhD at the LSE, the London School of Economics, and I was talking about data governance, what we were talking before.
And I went to talk to these communities affected by the construction of observatories, but I realized that they were, they had other concerns that they don't have to do with astronomy for example, lithium. So there was a very clear mismatch between my priorities, the priorities of Global North Academia, the ones from the priorities of these indigenous communities.
And that's only one example of the kind of power dynamics that we can find. And my hope with this article is that we're going to become more reflexive. So reflexivity sometimes is not too practical because you can get trapped into reflection. And sometimes there is no one solution for these kind of problems.
So I'm not being too ambitious in terms of the final goal, but I do think that it will be a very big change if we will be more reflexive when we studied these kinds of things.
Kerry:
Absolutely, and I think this is so important, not only because I think there's a real risk of damage that occurs when ideas become very divorced from their context, I think this is particularly noticeable with different kinds of indigenous knowledges that then become sort of very fetishized by aspects of academia.
And that's really complicated because on the one hand, there are definitely things that are interesting and beautiful about a lot of these knowledge systems. And at the same time, they're also so dependent on different places and cultures and contexts that I worry, sometimes I see the way that those ideas get picked up and moved around.
But also because, I do think that what you're modeling and that article, that kind of reflexivity is so crucial. Simply because, I think I was very lucky in my educational career. I did my PhD at the University of Cambridge Center for Gender Studies. And there I had a lot of really good mentorship and guidance around doing research ethically and thinking about extraction and research.
And these were conversations we were having throughout the whole PhD, very overtly really from day one. But I don't think that's the norm in a lot of places. I would love for that to be the norm and that's why I think work like what you're doing is so crucial. I think this kind of reflexive research is so important for us to discuss as researchers, but also for thinking about training and bringing up this next generation of researchers.
Sebastián:
Yeah, there are some disciplines or, strands of theory or branches of theory that, that have this more developed tradition of productivity.
Feminism is one of them. I think it's been key for feminism. It's like a key term if you want to do look at that kind of literature. But also anthropology, for example, I think since the 60s or the 70s, precisely because of the colonial past or present. I don't know, trajectory of anthropology. Maybe they have been invited to be more reflexive.
In my case, I do Latin American decolonial theory, one particular strand that's very broad that looks about the world, talks about the world system, capitalism and so on. But sometimes I think in those kind of very broad macro perspective, you forget your, you don't discuss your own positionality, right?
That's why I came into it to some extent.
Eleanor:
So thank you so much for joining us. It's been incredibly interesting and I look forward to hearing everything back and we'll be including lots of the stuff that you've written and the reading list.
So everyone can take a closer look. But until next time, thank you so much Seb.
Eleanor:
This episode was made possible thanks to the generosity of Christina Gore and the McArtle Foundation. It was produced by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney and edited by Eleanor Drage.
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