AI in Gaza: Live from Mexico City
This episode contains some descriptions of torture methods, automated human targeting by machines, and psychological warfare throughoutLast week Alix hosted a live show in Mexico City right after REAL ML. Four panellists discussed a huge important topic, which has been wrongfully deemed as taboo by other conferences: the use of AI and other technologies to support the ongoing genocide in Palestine.Here’s a preview of what the four speakers shared:Karen Palacio AKA kardaver gave us an overview of Operation Condor — a program of psychological warfare that ran in the late 20th century in South America to suppress activist voices.Marwa Fatafta explains how these methods are still used today against Palestinians; there are coordinated surveillance projects that make Palestinian citizens feel they are living in a panopticon, and the granular data storage and processing is facilitated by AWS, Google, and Azure.Matt Mahmoudi goes on to describe how these surveillance projects have crystallised into sophisticated CCTV and facial recognition networks through which Palestinians are continuously dehumanised via face-scanning and arbitrary checks that restrict movements.Wanda Muñez discusses how fully autonomous weapons obviously violate human rights in all kinds of ways — but ‘AI ethics’ frameworks never make any considerations for machines that make life or death decisions.Further reading & resources:The Biometric State by Keith Breckenridge — where the phrase ‘automated apartheid’ was conceivedCOGWAR Report by Karen Palacio, AKA KardaverSubscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!Wanda Muñez is an international consultant with twenty years of experience in the design, implementation and evaluation of programs and policies on human rights, gender equality, inclusion and the rights of people with disabilities. Wanda has worked for international NGOs and UN organizations in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. She became involved in the field of artificial intelligence in 2017, initially through the analysis of its intersection with International Humanitarian Law in the issues of autonomous weapons systems; and later focusing on the intersection between human rights and AI. In 2020, she was nominated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico as an independent expert at the Global Alliance on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), where she contributed to various publications and panels, and led the design of the research “Towards true gender equality and diversity in AI” that is currently being implemented. In 2020, Wanda Muñoz was recognized by the Nobel Women's Initiative as "a peacebuilder working for peace, justice and equality" and by UNLIREC as one of Latin America's "forces of change, working for humanitarian disarmament, non-proliferation and arms control. Wanda also just recently won DEI Champion of Year Award from Women in AI.Karen Palacio, aka kardaver, is an interdisciplinary digital artist, industrial programmer specialized in AI, and data scientist from Córdoba, Argentina. She researches and creates through iterative loops of implementation and reflection, aiming to understand what it means to articulate artistic-technological discourses from the Global South. Her performances, installations, and audiovisual works engage critically and rootedly with the depths of computation, the histories of computing and archives, freedom of knowledge, feminisms, and the pursuit of technological sovereignty. She develops and works with Free Software in her processes, resemanticizing technologies she knows from her background as an industrial programmer.Dr Matt Mahmoudi is Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge, and a Researcher/Advisor on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights at Amnesty International. Matt’s work has looked at AI-driven surveillance from the NYPD’s surveillance machine to Automated Apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territory. Matt is author of Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Controls (University of California Press, February 2025), and co-editor of Resisting Borders & Technologies of Violence (Haymarket, 2024) together with Mizue Aizeki and Coline Schupfer.Marwa Fatafta leads Access Now’s policy and advocacy work on digital rights in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Her work spans a number of issues at the nexus of human rights and technology including content governance and platform accountability, online censorship, digital surveillance, and transnational repression. She has written extensively on the digital occupation in Palestine and focuses on the role of new technologies in armed conflicts and humanitarian contexts and their impact on historically marginalized and oppressed communities. Marwa is a Policy Analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, an advisory board member of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, and an advisory committee member for Bread&Net. Marwa was a Fulbright scholar in the US and holds an MA in International Relations from Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. She holds a second MA in Development and Governance from the University of Duisburg-Essen.
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