The extinction pitch
Warnings from researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI that their own products could end humanity distract from the real damage AI is already doing.
AI
The grid inside the grid
Africa’s new AI factories promise digital sovereignty. Their electricity deals may instead create private power islands inside public systems.
The stories shaping Africa’s AI future
From leapfrogging optimism to warnings of a new extraction economy, the frameworks now defining Africa’s AI moment will decide who gets to shape the future and who is shaped by it
My mother’s buried story
AI tools are built on Eurocentric datasets. For Brazil’s Afro-descendants — whose histories were already marginalised from literature, academia, and media — it poses the threat of industrial-scale erasure.
How to read postcolonial writing
The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectation that writing from the South should sound opaque, excessive, and primitive.
The new scramble for Congo
Backed by the Trump administration, US mining firms, financiers, and tech investors are mounting an aggressive push into the DRC’s mineral sector, reviving an old imperial logic under the language of strategic competition.
Leapfrogging literacy?
In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.
The demise of curiosity
In an era when AI delivers the answer before the question is even asked, the sanctity of wonder is slipping away, and soon the act of asking might vanish entirely.
Africa and the AI race
At summits and in speeches, African leaders promise to harness AI for development. But without investment in power, connectivity, and people, the continent risks replaying old failures in new code.
When a black viking meets a black slave trader
What do computer generated images tell us about the evolution of coloniality and racialization in the AI era?
The valley is getting wider and deeper
Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. The question is whether we align AI to promote human rights or to defend private property and exploitation.
The story of depression and how we treat it
A new book weaves science, history, philosophy and personal narrative in a refreshing and more globally inclusive look at depression.
The promise and peril of the digital economy
How digital capitalism, despite often being framed as potential growth engine, exploits the already marginalized and reproduces inequalities and power-relations between Africans.
Machine wars
What does the expansion of artificial intelligence in warfare look like in West Africa and other US military outposts?
What is whiteness to a cyborg?
Tracing the digital contours of the settler colony helps us understand how old inequalities will shape a future with artificial intelligence.