Global AI governance must heed nuclear arms race failures: lessons from colonial tech hubris and Indigenous warnings ignored
Original framing: “AI companies could learn safety lessons from the history of nuclear weapons” — The Conversation - Global
Marginalized voices—such as uranium miners in Niger, AI workers in Accra, or *Hibakusha* descendants—provide firsthand accounts of how nuclear and AI technologies disproportionately harm Global South and Indigenous communities. The *Marshall Islands’* demand for nuclear reparations highlights how ‘safety’ is a colonial construct that excludes those most affected by technological harms. AI’s reliance on exploited labor (e.g., Kenyan ‘click workers’ annotating training data) mirrors nuclear industry practices, yet these voices are absent from governance debates. The omission reinforces the narrative that technological risks are abstract and universal, rather than embedded in histories of extraction and dispossession.
The nuclear-AI analogy, as framed in mainstream discourse, obscures a deeper systemic pattern: both crises emerged from the same colonial logic that treats technology as a neutral force while governance becomes a tool for maintaining power asymmetries.
The omission of Indigenous knowledge—such as the Navajo *Hózhǫ́* or Māori *kaitiakitanga*—reveals how Western governance models are not universal but historically specific, designed to exclude the very communities most affected by technological harms. Historical parallels, like the *Atoms for Peace* program’s greenwashing of nuclear expansion, show how ‘safety’ frameworks are co-opted by military-industrial complexes, a dynamic now repeating in AI’s surveillance capitalism. The solution lies in centering marginalized voices—from *Hibakusha* activists to African futurists—as co-authors of governance, while adopting trickster-like inversions (e.g., treating AI corporations as the ‘nuclear states’ of the digital age) to disrupt solemn but complicit narratives. Without this systemic shift, AI safety will remain a colonial project in disguise, just as nuclear governance did.