3Es for AI: Economics, Explanation, Epistemology

This article locates its roots/routes in multiple disciplinary formations and it seeks to advance critical thinking about an aspect of our contemporary socio-technical challenges by bracketing three knowledge formations—artificial intelligence (AI), economics, and epistemology—that have not often been considered together. In doing so, it responds to the growing calls for the necessity of further transdisciplinary engagements that have emanated from work in AI and also from other disciplines. The structure of the argument here is as follows. First, I begin by demonstrating how and why explanation is a problem in AI (“XAI problem”) and what directions are being taken by recent research that draws upon social sciences to address this, noting how there is a conspicuous lack of reference in this literature to economics. Second, I identify and analyze a problem of explanation that has long plagued economics too as a discipline. I show how only a few economists have ever attempted to grapple with this problem and provide their perspectives. Third, I provide an original genealogy of explanation in economics, demonstrating the changing nature of what was meant by an explanation. These systematic changes in consensual understanding of what occurs when something is said to have been “explained”, have reflected the methodological compromises that were rendered necessary to serve different epistemological tensions over time. Lastly, I identify the various relevant historical and conceptual overlaps between economics and AI. I conclude by suggesting that we must pay greater attention to the epistemologies underpinning socio-technical knowledges about the human. The problem of explanation in AI, like the problem of explanation in economics, is perhaps not only, or really, a problem of satisfactory explanation provision alone, but interwoven with questions of competing epistemological and ethical choices and related to the ways in which we choose sociotechnical arrangements and offer consent to be governed by them

Corporate Governance for Sustainability

The current model of corporate governance needs reform. There is mounting evidence that the practices of shareholder primacy drive company directors and executives to adopt the same short time horizon as financial markets. Pressure to meet the demands of the financial markets drives stock buybacks, excessive dividends and a failure to invest in productive capabilities. The result is a ‘tragedy of the horizon’, with corporations and their shareholders failing to consider environmental, social or even their own, long-term, economic sustainability. With less than a decade left to address the threat of climate change, and with consensus emerging that businesses need to be held accountable for their contribution, it is time to act and reform corporate governance in the EU. The statement puts forward specific recommendations to clarify the obligations of company boards and directors and make corporate governance practice significantly more sustainable and focused on the long term

Interrogating the subject-world of economic epistemology: re-imagining theory and difference

The epistemological inheritance of economics is 'rooted' in the enlightenment tensions over knowledge, thus demonstrating how the endeavour of economics is not a universal timeless objective science but a 'routed' body of knowledge whose underlying foundations are structured by the contingent emergence of ideas in a geohistorical-temporal-ideological context in line with a wider discursive fixing of objectivity and representation in knowledge. This modernist rendition of knowledge relies upon - an elision of difference; a separated view of the domains of the economic, political, social; a particular version of subjectivity which is narrowly obtained but unjustifiably universalised. A postcolonial moment in epistemology is needed to place difference at the heart of self and identity in order to disrupt knowledge based upon manufacturing conceptual abstractions and universalising their essence. One such intervention is the juxtaposition of identity with the economic. The problematics of identity in economics are discussed and the wider ways of attempting a reconciliation of the diversity of subjects with the desire for systematic knowledge are evaluated. A detailed critical assessment of economists' rare discourse on identity is followed by a differentiation of the concentric and the translational views on identity. Addressing the separation of culture and economy involves attending to the slippage between economics, economy, economic; rethinking the link between the value and values; and considering identity as a translation. Finally, writing economic theory another way is presented as a rewriting the conditions of theory itself. Implications of economic theories as textual productions are analysed and the complexities of emancipation and epistemology are explored. The dominant methods of economics do not have a universal purchase on understanding the economic aspects of human life. Overcoming the economic logic that permeates all aspects of existence and yet remains unquestioned in the terrains of knowledge production is essential

Democracy in the Non-West: Facts, Fictions and Frictions

The author deals with the Western concept of democracy and compares the Western ideas of democracy with experiences and developments in the Asian context, especially the history of colonialism and nation-building in Asia

India, Israel, and Geopolitical Imaginaries of Cooperation and Oppression

Portrayals of India and Israel as strategic partners or allies in the oppression of Kashmiris and Palestinians often suggest that India emulates Israel in how it manages oppression. Yet, the designation of Israel as a unique source of learning for oppression limits the recognition of the indigenous Indian nature of the long-standing ideological and technological infrastructures of occupation in Kashmir. We must eschew simplistic geopolitical imaginaries of cooperation and oppression and pay greater attention to the similarities as well as the differences across contexts

Economics Turning People into Things

Nitasha Kaul argues that economic violence refers not only to violence caused for economic reasons, but also to violence caused by spurious economics. It is economic violence when people lose their jobs and livelihoods, when they witness massively divergent rewards for work and when they see an endless perpetuation of inequality around them. Such involuntary unemployment in the long run leads to social breakdown and community fragmentation

Challenging Nation-Statism : Political Boundaries and Bodies at the Border

Critical scholarship can be a way of enacting insurrections against entrenched and enduring dogmatisms of the nation-state and its inalienable right to systematically deploy violence against selective Others. This article focuses upon the violent bordering practices of the nation-statist system, their connexion to the bordering of knowledges, and their impact upon specific kinds of bodies at the border, which together enforce a systemic vulnerability that is tied to legacies of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism. In the first part, I reflect upon the violence of bordering practices in the nation-statist system, foregrounding how those who predominantly receive this violence in the form of death and debility are the racialized Others. I put forth four specific implications of these violent bordering practices: they enable a cascade of interlinked dehumanizations of people within the nation-state borders; they occlude from view how any nation-state is not homogeneous over time in terms of what one might see as national culture; they allow economic processes to be perceived as scientific and abstract rather than as embedded in the realms of contested political jurisdictions; and they render and sustain the nation-state itself as a racialized construct that both produces and profits from class inequality in contemporary capitalism. In the second part, I argue for the need to perceive the link between violent bordering practices and bordered knowledges, highlighting and synthesizing insights from across disciplines that can aid in asking counter-hegemonic questions. In conclusion, and as part of necessary anti-national scholarly enquiry, I call for a multidimensional and sustained critical stance towards the nation-states’ rights to enforce borders