Rebooting artificial intelligence: Insurgent Afrofuturism and speculative design

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is hegemonically framed through the language of efficiency and scale, conditioning futures through trajectories of profit and control. This framing obscures that AI is inscribed by regimes of power, rooted in extractive colonial and racialized histories. This article explores an alternative trajectory: approaching AI not as an inevitable technology of progress driven by corporate actors, but as a political formation whose groundings and sociotechnical imaginaries are open to challenge. We invoke Afrofuturism in conjunction with speculative design as a critical methodology to unsettle dominant techno-futures. This is based on a collaborative project involving university researchers and BLAST Fest, a Black-led community organisation in the UK. Through a series of co-designed group activities and participatory workshops, AI was interrogated with speculative tools to activate other possibilities. Moving away from common tropes of inclusion and fairness in existing systems of AI, the project developed four critical orientations: equity; epistemic justice; re-purposing technology and alternative timelines for reimagining AI. These orientations trace how project collaborators questioned AI's assumptions, contested its dominant imaginaries and explored what might be refused or rebuilt from minoritised standpoints. We propose that Rebooting AI is a collective counter-imaginary practice: a way of developing critical AI literacy as collective agency, opening space for imagining technological futures otherwise.