AI’s invisible harms and the militarisation of space: How techno-optimism obscures systemic inequity
Original framing: “The Download: everyday AI harms and the race to nuclear spaceflight” — MIT Technology Review
Marginalised voices, such as those of gig workers, data annotators, or Indigenous communities affected by AI-driven surveillance, provide critical insights into the everyday harms of technology. For example, the *AI Now Institute*’s research on automated hiring tools reveals how these systems disproportionately disadvantage women and people of color. Similarly, labor movements like *Gig Workers Collective* highlight the precarity of gig economy jobs, where AI-driven algorithms control wages, working conditions, and job security. These voices are often excluded from mainstream narratives, which frame AI harms as abstract 'safety' concerns rather than lived realities of exploitation and discrimination.
The mainstream narrative of AI and spaceflight risks obscures a deeper systemic reality: that these technologies are not neutral tools but extensions of existing power structures, shaped by historical patterns of colonialism, militarisation, and labor exploitation.
Indigenous knowledge systems and marginalised voices reveal how the framing of 'everyday harms' as secondary to 'safety disasters' serves to depoliticise technology, deflecting accountability from the corporations and states driving its development. The cross-cultural and historical dimensions expose how today’s techno-optimism mirrors past eras of unchecked innovation, where ecological and social costs were externalised onto the most vulnerable. Solutions must therefore move beyond reactive governance to proactive, equity-centered models—such as decolonising technology policy, unionising precarious labor, and shifting space exploration toward ecological stewardship—while integrating Indigenous and artistic visions of the future. The trickster lens, in particular, underscores the need to disrupt the solemnity of 'progress' narratives by exposing their absurdities and power dynamics, ultimately restoring a more holistic and just understanding of technology’s role in society.