Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

This Essay draws connections between Octavia Butler’s Parable series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents), HBO’s Westworld, and Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism to highlight how the reconfiguration and transmutation of race through technological change is facilitated by corresponding shifts in legal doctrine, theory, policy, and practice. It takes the overlapping threads from these three sources, which struggle with the idea of change within larger systems of unavoidable, repetitive destruction, and ties them to the law’s role in helping to shield race through the storms of change by being similarly nimble, flexible, and perseverant. The Essay identifies a theme found in both the selected Afrofuturistic works and in tech-centered legal doctrine, regulation, and theory that illuminate the law’s role in reconstituting the fraught relationship between race and technology: the promise of utopia. The Essay explores this concept in the context of emerging debates on the function, utility, and harm of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which has been promoted as the latest tool toward a transhumanist future devoid of the trappings of humanity’s biggest flaws. It proposes four emanating values, Ustopia, Sankofa, Data Justice, and Data Power, which should help guide advocacy, policymaking, and resistance in an increasingly AI dominated future. It ultimately concludes that an Afrofuturistic lens is not only important for under-standing the potential harms of AI and developing regulatory frameworks but also necessary for imagining how such technologies could serve the interests of radical Black futures. The Essay contributes to a burgeoning literature using Afrofuturism—which situates the Black struggle in persistent yet continuously changing structural disparities and power relations—as an important departure point for expressing data precarity and reimagining new modes of data protection.

Publication Citation

112 Georgetown Law Journal 1299 (2024)

Disciplines

Civil Rights and Discrimination | Law | Law and Race | Law and Society

Download

Share

COinS