Sylvia Wynter

By examining the relevance of Sylvia Wynter's work in the context of AI, beginning with her 1992 analysis “ ‘No Humans Involved’ ” on the Rodney King beating, this article argues that her oeuvre highlights the peculiar risks of privileging and naturalization of certain public rhetorics, disciplinary frames of reference, methodologies, and epistemologies over others, especially as political interests and economic valuation drive tech design, development, and deployment. Wynter's writings also directly challenge commonplaces about AI innovations as inexorable, especially in relation to sanguine arguments about human-centered AI, the future of work, and civilization's progress. Her work in particular has important implications for civil rights and international human rights policies that risk becoming lost in current debates over humans in the loop and algorithmic taxonomies of human types.