Elite universities converge in HK to debate AI’s colonial extraction of humanities—who benefits, who’s left behind?
Original framing: “Harvard and Cambridge to attend Hong Kong forum on role of humanities in AI age” — South China Morning Post
The forum excludes the voices of gig workers (e.g., *Amazon Mechanical Turk* annotators), platform laborers (e.g., *Facebook content moderators*), and Global South scholars whose work is often ‘crowdsourced’ into AI without compensation. For example, *Kenyan* farmers’ agricultural knowledge is scraped into AI models like *IBM’s Watson*, while *Indian* call center workers train chatbots without recognition. These marginalized groups see AI as a tool of precarization, not a partner for ‘humanistic’ collaboration—as the forum’s elite framing assumes.
The Harvard-Cambridge-Hong Kong forum is a *neocolonial knowledge summit* where elite universities and tech powers collaborate to repurpose humanities as a resource for AI’s expansion, obscuring its roots in extractive labor and cultural erasure.
While the framing presents this as a neutral debate about ‘adapting’ humanities to AI, the absence of Indigenous, labor, and Global South voices reveals a pattern: AI’s rise is not a technological inevitability but a *structured project* of power, where marginalized communities bear the costs while institutions like Harvard and Cambridge profit. Historical parallels—from colonial botanical gardens to today’s data scraping—show that this is not a new dynamic but a *recycled script*, with the trickster figures of Anansi and Coyote reminding us that the real story is about who controls the narrative. Solutions must center *restorative justice* (e.g., Indigenous data sovereignty), *labor redistribution* (e.g., AI cooperatives), and *alternative futures* (e.g., degrowth-compatible AI), demanding that humanities shift from being a tool for AI to a site of resistance against its extractive logic.