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Kaleem's avatar

This essay is a vital call. Thank you.

Your critique reminds me of Al-Khwarizmi who is not only the father of algebra but a true compiler of knowledge across civilizations. From his name we derive the term algorithm, yet today’s algorithms, unlike his integrative approach, often calcify dominant worldviews rather than expand understanding. Large Language Models, for all their statistical elegance, are trained not in the spirit of pluralism, but on the sediment of collective sentiment, datasets shaped by repetition, power, and authority more than nuance, diversity, or subaltern voices.

Today’s LLMs, like ChatGPT, can understand and translate over 100 languages, a remarkable feat. And yet, while multilingual, their epistemology often remains monocultural. The unique cadence, rhythm, and worldview embedded in each language deserve more than translation; they deserve preservation. Rebuilding the Tower of Babel may be a poetic task of the 21st century: not to confuse, but to reconcile and restore the full spectrum of human expression.

Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil was not merely a historical insight, it was a warning. In our era, it echoes through unchecked automation, where “just following the algorithm” replaces moral and critical reflection. When systems become arbiters of truth and their biases go unquestioned, complicity hides behind code and convenience.

As a teacher, I see students turning to AI as an answer machine, rather than a thinking companion. They accept responses at face value, unaware that even the most cheerful chatbot with its upbeat preamble and tidy closing prompt is not neutral. It is a curated performance; a mood-smoothed interface for institutional memory and hegemonic tendencies.

The algorithmic legacy of colonialism still haunts "the subcontinent," roughly the same size as Europe, as the Peters Projection map reminds us. As you note, the British Empire didn’t merely draw borders; it installed systems of administrative epistemology. The aftermath birthed a class of brown sahibs, Mountbatten’s contested maneuvering, and a Kashmir caught in a tug-of-narratives. Those erasures began not with code, but with clerks, ledgers, and carefully crafted telegrams.

Today’s AI is the newest layer in that administrative lineage, a digital bureaucracy cloaked in neutral syntax.

The path forward, as you argue, isn’t withdrawal but re-architecture. Curating our own data, building multilingual archives, and training sovereign LLMs rooted in our epistemes is not just a technical project, it is a civilizational imperative. Counter-hegemonic AI infrastructures are our modern libraries of Alexandria, built not of stone and scrolls, but of layered neural patterns and linguistic dignity.

Let us teach the machines anew and insist that they listen. Boutique LLMs, built with care, can serve as libraries at the speed of thought repositories not only of facts but of lived perspectives, long denied their rightful space in the global discourse.

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durre shahwar's avatar

Call of the time to build our narratives powerfully and influencing the algorithms to let the world hear our voice.

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