UPDATE: A complete set of Māori ethics Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti and Māori Ethics Guidelines for: AI, Algorithms, Data and IOT
This is the first in a series of articles I am writing about Māori ethics with AI, Data sovereignty and Robotics. Article 2 Māori ethics associated with AI systems architecture.
I spent this week in Weimar Germany as a recipient of the Goethe-Institut’s 2nd Kultursymposium 2019. I was one of 50 country representatives of 300 delegates. There was an international group of experts, artists and speakers from a range of disciplines discussing the social issues that are affecting us globally.
I attended a number of seminars about robotics, Artificial Intelligence and its cultural impacts as well as technological advancements and democracy seminars. I considered each workshop through a Māori lens as well as for a new future that will impact on everyone.
The experts believe that emerging technology will either be really good for humans or really bad. That technology is at the stage where we can make it good for the human race, much like people did with the industrial age, it was customised to assist people not only empower the owners of the technology.
From an indigenous perspective; I also agree with the experts. Māori and other Indigenous Peoples are either on the verge of the biggest international Colonisation weapon which will destroy all minority beliefs and cultures; or we are on the verge of significant and beneficial change that could remove racism and prejudice and really empower all human beings. But, Indigenous People/Māori need to be a part of the new technological revolution now and begin to get involved. If we don’t we will be just another negative statistic.
Robotics
In one session a robotics designer showed how her robot designed for sick children who cannot attend school for months. The robot was designed to solve the social issues for children returning to school. The robot is controlled by the child from the hospital or home. The robot is physically in the classroom. The child has tele access so can see a d verbally interact with others in the classroom as though the child was in the class. I also envisage this could help people with anxiety issues.
My thoughts were on the impacts to Māori as this technology will be mainstream soon. Māori culture only recently adapted to email communications, video conferencing and we are still divided over online tangi (funerals)? We don’t have people using phone conference for hui (meetings) on the marae at the moment. How will our culture react when people who cannot attend a hui or a tangi in person, but instead use a robot to participate?
Call me crazy, but it was only 9 years ago after my children’s mother died and I witnessed whānau (family) who could not attend the tangi due to finances. I then spoke about the need for online streaming of tangi and the benefits. I was ridiculed publicly and in private by many. But we saw the Māori queen, Api Mahuika and other leaders tangi being streamed and broadcast on television. Māori need to start planning and considering how robots will be used on the marae and at tangi. It will not be a question of if, but when.
Some tikanga (lore) issues could involve discussions about if the robot can be shared by multiple people or if the robot would contain the mauri (spirit) of the person who used it? Others may argue that the wairua will be vulnerable.
Another issue will likely be how will a person be verified if using a robot? Also security issues such as the robot being hacked and causing trouble or being offensive.
Facial Recognition
Another session I attended was by international experts speaking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and facial recognition. AI relies on algorithms and data that has been produced by usually white middle aged men. We know that the world’s data prefers white middle aged men. As a result the data and algorithms prejudice against women, LGBTQ and minorities. This session preceded a session with minority activists, one of whom was forced to leave his home country to avoid being jailed for freedom of speech. Had the activist not had dual citizenship by birth, he may be in jail. This made me more concerned about state controlled facial recognition and Māori being further discriminated against. Most Māori would not have dual citizenship and if they do it is likely to be Australia who would send you back to New Zealand, assuming they admitted you in to their country.
For Māori we already know we feature highly in all negative statistics. If an Algorithm was to use Oranga Tamariki data now, to predict who would be unsafe parents the implications would be devastating. Algorithms are racist. The risks to Māori are huge and dangerous if we do not get involved with AI now.
Face recognition is popular in Europe for employment recruitment. The algorithm looks at a candidate’s facial expressions to situations. A good candidate will react the same as the senior management who the algorithm is based. This will create a new era of racial discrimination for Māori in employment. Previous generations of Māori were discriminated against with jobs for being Māori or having a Māori name. Facial recognition will likely not consider Māori cultural facial expressions unless the senior management team are Māori. Many common facial traits with Māori include: raising their eyebrows, puck their lips, a unique sense of humor and not engaging in prolonged eye contact. These cultural expressions will discriminate against Māori and add to unemployment issues.
Falling in love with a Robot or hologram
At another session we heard of an increasing amount of lonely people who fall in love with a hologram. In Japan people were getting married to a hologram. These holograms learn from the human emotions and will text the human and act like the hologram loves the human. We have an increasing amount of kaumatua and young people becoming isolated. Māori culture will need to consider this. Furthermore, we need to consider people marrying robots and holograms. Research shows it is common for people to become emotionally attached to these machines as though the machine or hologram was a real person.
I envisage holograms will be the next generation of cultural misappropriation. We need to consider this now and work to improve the Copyright Act and progress the WAI 262 claim to prepare for these changes.
Already, there is widespread cultural misappropriation of photos of Māori and Māori artwork. Of more concern is the statistics that show an increasing fetish for Māori in the pornography industry. It would be likely that holograms and robots will be visually Māori and even duplicated from photos of people on the Internet. It is already common to see photos and videos that use someone else’s face.
Maori issues are not unique
As a part of the fellowship, I was interviewed and followed around by the main TV station. One of the interviews was with another fellow from Zimbabwe, a post-futurist writer, photographer and activist. We were invited to talk about what we got out of the conference and what we will take back home. The documentary is here.
Interestingly we both agreed with each other and said the same things. The other recipient used terms such as “people of color” and “all shades of black” while I used the terms “Indigenous” and “Māori”. She also advocated for fair access and against bias algorithms against the LBQT community.
The key message I stated was that although New Zealand is a little country at the bottom of the world and Māori are the minority, the worlds technology is growing so rapidly that we need to get on board now, even if mainstream New Zealand are not.
Cultural Benefits
The benefits of AI and robotics are huge and far too many to mention in this blog post. I imagine AI proving that much of our traditional knowledge is in fact science and that many of our traditional food gathering techniques and harvesting will prove how sustainable we were. This could lead to international changes in a world where we are looking at food shortages and synthetic meat products.
Many of our marae are near the ocean and will be immediately impacted by global warming and rising oceans. AI would be a great way to determine where a suitable long term site would be and what exactly the damages of raising oceans are for the Iwi and marae.
In 2000 I made a number of technological predictions that impact on Māori over the ten years, to the then CEO of Ngāi Tahu Development Corporation. All of my predictions have come to fruition, including one prediction that I was told would never happen. That was operating systems and the Internet would be used in Te Reo Māori (Māori language) and that computers would one day translate Māori language. We don’t think twice about that now.
I predict that in the next 5 to 10 years, robots and holograms will speak and teach te reo Māori. That we will see a much more sophisticated and eloquent use of te reo Māori being used. This will be due to all of the current digital corpus’s and other material such as Moteatea, Apirana Ngata, Pei Te Hurunui Jones and all of the other scholars written material being used for algorithms that will speak Māori like our great scholars did. This will then become standard day to day language for Māori speakers.
Māori land issues and succession will be automated and hassle free with algorithms that will automatically make successions and provide details on the best usage of land based on the soil, climate and future weather events.
I believe socially, AI could be used if done in co-design with Māori, could elevate Māori out of all of the negative stats we are in. I believe AI could reverse the impacts of intergenerational Colonisation by empowering individuals, whānau and Iwi. AI only works with data that is input into the computer. Using non bias data, the system will see the issues and provide benefits.
Conclusion
Technology is rapidly developing and being normalised around the world. In New Zealand the general population seem to be sheltered from a lot of it. Maori need to be aware of the emerging technology and consider now how we adapt it as a culture and how we get our people involved. If we do not, we risk another wave of digital Colonisation that the Internet created and another digital divide where Maori were highly disadvantaged.
I believe that Māori and Indigenous Peoples will benefit from AI as we did from the Internet, but as with the introduction of the Internet and WWW, there was a lot of abuse of traditional Māori knowledge and beliefs, as there has been with all other Indigenous Peoples. Hence we know have terms such as Digital Colonialism and Data Sovereignty.
I use the term customary Māori rights as there is no one Māori view due to several hundred years of colonisation, introduced and forced religions, cultural assimilation, laws against traditional and customary Māori knowledge and Native Schools where speaking our language was punishable with corporal punishment. This lead to generation X, being, in my opinion the first generation to be able to freely identify and use our culture in our own country: later generations more so.
The issues Māori will face with Artificial Intelligence and Robotics is not unique to Māori. The issues are shared with all minorities of the world. As minorities we will continue to face digital discrimination until we all have more of our people working in the area of robotics and Artificial Intelligence.
Māori need to be involved now, not only with AI and robotics but with ethics.
Part 2: Māori ethics associated with AI systems architecture
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