Karim Hirji has written a deep, thoughtful, mind-boggling book about AI and Neoliberalism. Artificial Intelligence, Society and Religion: Crossroads of Algorithm, Neoliberalism and Faith (Daraja Press in collaboration with Zand Press) is a deeply theoretical and dense book—in the best sense of that word. I have read many pages more than three times because the subject is so complex and cannot be fully grasped in one reading—and each re-reading is a new journey of consciousness and insight.
I came to this wonderful book in my role as a civil rights anti-imperialist organizer. Every year, my organization, the Labor Community Strategy Center and our Strategy and Soul Bookstore, sets up a booth at Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. There I was approached by Rosa Hirji, a prominent attorney fighting for the rights of children and the disabled. She knew of my work and had been a community organizer in South Central Los Angeles where we all work. She told me about her father Karim Hirji, and his forthcoming book—a political analysis of the impact of AI—and she explained he had been one of the editors of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa—among the books that have most shaped my life—and asked if I would write an essay engaging his book.
Through this process, I have been in joyful correspondence with Karim Hirji and have also worked closely with Firoze Manji, the editor of the impressive Dajara Press that published AI, Society, and Religion.
Karim Hirji and I share a mutual and deep commitment to the nations of the Global South and the Third World in their struggle against U.S. and European imperialism. He teaches at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where Walter Rodney other Third World visionaries created a revolutionary community for strategy, intellectual investigation, publishing, and community building—and where at some point in my life, I hope to be able to study and learn. So, given the broad scope of his monumental exploration, I have focused on how this book and its discussion of Artificial Intelligence has raised my consciousness and is a gift to the work of the civil rights, climate justice, and international anti-imperialist movement. With this essay, while many know of Hirji’ s work, I hope to expand his audience to more civil rights, climate justice, immigrant rights, and human rights organizers and lead them to this important work. I have chosen to include long quotes from the author because it allows him to speak for himself and because it is the best way to show the complexity of his imagination and mind.
Hirji begins with definitions—a theoretical explanation of phenomena. He frames the technology of Artificial Intelligence beginning with human intelligence.
HUMANS POSSESS INTELLIGENCE. It enables them to interact with and survive in a complex natural and social environment. They learn from experience, make tools, adapt to change, plan and act in a rational manner and formulate abstract ideas. Human intelligence is a multi-faceted entity encompassing emotional, social, artistic and ethical dimensions. Animals display these characteristics as well, but in a partial and rudimentary form. A machine that displays any of these human characteristics is said to possess Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Then he moves directly to the moral and political challenge.
The rapid pace of AI development raises fundamental questions about the future of humanity. Some assert that AI will facilitate the resolution of the major problems facing humanity. But others contend that on balance, it will mostly benefit a few, induce mass unemployment, widen national and international inequalities, worsen the climate crisis and generate major social upheavals. In the long run, it may lead to sentient artificial machines that will take over the world.
While this book clearly warns about a new lethal phenomenon, it’s important that readers resist the urge to capitulate to the power and seeming inevitability of enslaving technology. While the specificity and challenges of AI are unique, they are only the latest escalation of the weapons of mass murder produced by the European barbarians who came to the Americas. In 1492, they came with horses, razor sharp swords, cross bows, and guns that rang out like thunder. They proceeded to systematically murder 90 million of the 100 million Indigenous inhabitants in 100 years with machetes, small pox blankets, and every imaginable form of savage barbarism. Each generation of imperialists kept inventing greater and greater technologies of pain and destruction—pistols, rifles, machine guns, planes, aerial bombing, atomic bombs, napalm, saturation bombing, Agent Orange, and helicopter attacks. AI is the latest in that grotesque tradition.
Still, in the midst the latest attacks by U.S. fascists and the he fear and despondency MAGA has created among so many, despite the alienated loneliness that AI promises to remedy, AI must be analyzed in terms of the danger it poses and the specificity of its threat to life. The present and future will test our wills as this is truly a plan by a few humans to take over the earth and create AI-led spiritual and physical death.
The System of Neoliberalism shapes the problem
Hirji elucidates the three-way confluence of AI, social factors and religion. But as he makes clear,
“[T]he exposition is cognizant of the fact that modern religions and AI systems function in the context of the global neoliberal system and reflect the values of that system.”
The struggle against the genocidal theory of Eugenics
For me, the most compelling discussion in the book is Hirji’ s detailed engagement with the nefarious theory of Eugenics. As he writes,
Modern conceptualizations of intelligence began with Francis Galton, one of the founders of the science of statistics. Working in the late 1800s, he devised key ideas like correlation, regression, standard deviation, median and questionnaire research that are the standard tools of applied statistical analysis today. Galton also founded the discipline of Eugenics whose primary tenet is that individuals can be ranked in terms of intellectual and moral worth, and that these characteristics are hereditary.
The proponents of Eugenics held that some races and ethnic groups are intellectually, physically and morally superior than other races and ethnic groups. The former have a preponderance of ‘good’ genes while the latter have a preponderance of ‘bad’ genes. [According to this heinous theory]
White people of Anglo-Saxon stock, with Nordic (Aryan) features (blond, fair hair, blue eyes) have innately superior intelligence, health status, ability to excel in life and moral character compared to others. On this scale, people of African background were placed at the bottom.
By extending their principles to cover entire racial and ethnic groups Eugenics was nothing other than scientific racism. The pseudo-scientific doctrine of Eugenics gained wide acceptance in the US and the Western world in the first three decades of the 20th century. Ultimately, it culminated in the horrors of the Nazi death camps in which millions of Jews, communists, Roma people, and persons with mental and physical disabilities were killed. In the US and the Scandinavian nations, tens of thousands of ‘degenerates’ were forcibly sterilized and confined without due cause. Racial minorities and women bore the brunt of the eugenic oppression.
Hirji moves on to assault another construction of genocidal theory: The Bell Curve.
The publication of Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life argued that IQ is a reliable composite measure of cognitive abilities, IQ is linked to genes and is largely inherited. The Bell Curve authors quickly move to their premeditated genocidal conclusions.
The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women who are disproportionately at the low level of the intelligence distribution.
Hirji elaborates endless statistical refutations of their methodology. Then he supports the conclusion of Matthew Yglesias,
The Bell Curve is after all, not a work of scientific research but rather a political book written by one of the most prominent conservative policy entrepreneurs in America as part of a larger ideological project.
From there, it is a logical extension of those beliefs to construct and expand the police and prison state.
In the face of these terrifying beliefs and actions, what is the role of social movements challenging them? To begin with, the Movement has to go on the ideological and political offensive—not just to refute genocidal theories but to expose them and offer a liberating vision of the humanity and intelligence of the oppressed.
I want to focus on the struggle to elevate the young, gifted, and Black children in the face of this assault and to encourage the resistance of the oppressed to fully occupy their own leadership to fight for their humanity and change the world.
In the South Bronx in 1962, I got a job as a recreation worker at the East Side Settlement House in the South Bronx. I saw the 25 young Black and Puerto Rican young people with whom I was working in the program as 
complicated, talented, moody, angry, young people human beings who were facing joy and depression and acting out. I did not need an IQ or any other test to confirm what my eyes and heart made clear—Black and Puerto Rican children were advanced emotionally, intellectually, and culturally. They had great operative intelligence, both abstract and applied, and in difficult circumstances, they had a great sense of humor and problem-solving capacities greater than many of my former white high school classmates.
In 1965 I was a civil rights organizer with the Newark Community Union Project living and working in the South Ward. I got a job in an 8thth great teacher in an all-Black middle school. I was told that my students were already way below grade level and needed firm discipline. When one teacher proposed bringing in a Black student from the Virginia Military Academy, I proposed that they also bring in Stokely Carmichael to speak to the students against about the war in Vietnam. I taught the students anatomy and physiology and explained the reproductive process and the essential role of birth control. Anatomy. When some students seemed bored and restless I suggested they walk around the class and look out the window. Our texts were so old I had to buy some new books. I got 35 copies of My Weekly Reader that the students enjoyed. I tried to figure out the problems of classroom discipline among 8th grade kids who were just being themselves. I did a lot of my teaching in the front of the room only with those students who wanted it and asked those who did want to participate to respect the experiment and be quieter in the back. Reinforcing my theory, many students out of boredom and jealousy of the students who seemed to be having a good time and learning, began to ask if they could join the actual class. I appealed to their intelligence and decision-making skills rather that than used guilt, abuse, and intimidation to motivate them. One parent told me that, everyone knew that Ronald was intelligent but you brought out his brilliance. I did the best I could —and but I always valued the intelligence of and humanity of my students.
But these experiences were in 1963 in the South Bronx and 1967 in Newark. This was the time the civil rights movement was on the ascendancy, people were demanding Black Power, and Nina Simone and our movement was telling the children, “You are Young, Gifted, and Black.” Today, the counterrevolution is in full force and anti-Blackness, once is momentary retreat, is even more so, the “law of the land.”
In the struggle against “standardized testing” in the Los Angeles Schools, in which Black students as a group had significantly lower test scores than white students, Black parents responded to the school board, “You have no right to ‘test’ our children whose lives you are attacking and hurting; no right to be judge, jury, and executioner to measure the success of your subjugation.”
In Los Angeles, from 2000 to the present, my organization, the Labor/Community Strategy Center—in coalition with Community Coalition, Students Deserve, CADRE, Black Lives Matter, and Inner-City Struggle—has been fighting “the school to prison pipeline.” In our work, we have stopped the school system from giving tickets for “truancy” to students who were late for school they came to attend, stopped suspensions of Black boys for the racially constructed violation called “willful defiance,” and forced the LA School Board to return one tank, 3 grenade launchers, and 61 M-16 assault rifles to the Department of Defense 1033 program. After the death of George Floyd, our movement was able to get the school board to cut is school police force by 35% and $25 million. But we raised the challenge to the board and Los Angeles School Police of why they had a school police force in the first place—and still maintain one.
The LAUSD is a liberal school board, yet they were the ones who created “zero tolerance” truancy tickets, used the term “willful defiance,” as a racist pretense to discipline, suspend and expel Black boys. They created the school police force, and purchased tanks, guns, and M-16s from the U.S. Department of Defense to be used against their students and their families.
And then many superintendents, principals, and some teachers express shock, dismay, and despair that Black students score significantly below grade average in language, mathematic, and other “standardized tests.” Besides the abuses Black children and their families experience in the larger racist society, it is the public schools who fail the children and repress them into lower performances through a pedagogical model based on contempt and punishment. Then school boards administer standardized tests to measure and “prove” their racial stereotypes of the Black students they claim to love.
But you should hear the counter-hegemonic testimony of the Black students every month at the School board meeting. “The Los Angeles School Police patrolling our schools as if we are prisoners makes me sick. I get up and don’t want to go to school to study in a police state.” “you are the failures, you should quit your jobs since you don’t know how to educate us. We want the Black Student Achievement Plan defended and expanded because it is Black students who have the plan for our own liberation.” The fight against internalized oppression by the oppressed themselves is central to the fight against eugenics and genocide.
Karim Hirji’ s exposition of the statistics and intent of the Eugenics Movement gives a brilliant historical frame to the work organizers are doing today. Kirji situates the problems of racism, racist science, and the destructive outcomes of AI inside a systematic analysis of neo-liberalism.
Neoliberalism has no integral link to freedom. It functions as well under constrained democracy, authoritarianism, dictatorship or military rule. It perpetuates itself by fomenting divisions along race, ethnic, gender, religious and national lines. Electoral choice revolves around wedge issues that pit pro-corporate parties against one another. Neoliberalism is a dogmatic, not an evidence-based, doctrine. It serves the 1%.
Neoliberalism fertilizes daunting global problems like hunger, extreme poverty, refugee crisis, authoritarianism and extremism, global climate change and loss of biodiversity. Yet, neoliberal tenets of individualism, privatization and reliance on the market dominate individual thought and public policy, in rich and poor nations.
Neoliberalism exercises greater influence\ over humanity than any religion. In practice, if not in theory, religious leaders and institutions across the world today have adapted to the tenets of neoliberalism. Most of the atheists and irreligious today also abide by neoliberal tenets. At best, they seek to reform, not eliminate, it.
Hijri argues that the only consequential challenge to neoliberalism comes from a democratic socialist perspective.
Neoliberalism is a major force shaping the development of AI and its applications. The socio-political values of neoliberalism and the divisions it engenders exercise a critical influence on the values embedded in modern AI algorithms.
Film and Fiction on Man’s Creation of Artificial Sentient Life
One of my favorite sections in the book is Hirji’s interrogation of the contradictions between man and machine in the world of AI. He describes seminal films about the human interface with machines. He does a brilliant exegesis of the plots and lessons of three important films: Frankenstein, Star Wars, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Frankenstein is more than a tale of fantasy. It raises troubling questions about the wisdom and ethics of creating powerful human-like machines. It depicts the unintended consequences of scientific hubris and begs the salient queries: Who was the monster: Victor of the Humanoid? Should science always be enjoined with morality. What is the meaning of life.
This question is in fact, the central question in Hirji’ s challenging book and one with which we all struggle on our own journey for meaning.
Frankenstein is a kind-hearted being who likes to help people, make friends, and be socially acceptable. But, with their biased notions of good and bad people everywhere reject it—generating escalating deadly confrontations after which the two sides are irrevocably irreconcilable. Conversely, in Star Wars, R2D2 is unquestionably dedicated to its human team to the point of sacrificing itself in order to protect them. In 2001 A Space Odyssey, the sentient robot HAL 9000 (Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer) develops a mind of its own. It feels that the humans on board are beneath him [and act superior to him] and starts killing them one by one.
Today, if AI is also a “labor saving device” and can do many functions better than the humans who created it, more and more people will become peripheral to the technological society. Again, it will come down to theories of race and racism but AI will continue the long history of mass annihilation of subject peoples.
As Hirji continues the conversation,
Many world leaders who have pondered on the ethics of AI, have failed to clearly draw attention to the most egregious ethical transgression associated with AI, namely the deployment of AI in war and mass murder. Very few luminaries have specifically linked such an ethical transgressions with the deployment of AI in the Israeli assault on Gaza and Palestine.
Three, decades of propaganda from Western sources has created a biased vision of Israel across the world. Life under the neoliberal, profit-seeking system has immersed people into individualistic tendencies and away from collective action for social change. And lax moral standards engendered by neoliberalism and jingoism have propelled people into a state of ethical dissonance that makes them easily accept that not all human lives are equally worthy.
The striking absence of Israeli actions in the ethical discourse on AI has been catastrophic for the first victims of an AI-driven genocide. The people of Palestine and their children are being killed in droves with the help of AI powered weapons and platforms, but the veritable abundance of discourse on the ethics of AI has all but ignored them. Not only are they being physically exterminated as a nation but they are being erased from history as well.
Hirji ends this discussion with a sober but optimistic assessment of the world backlash of condemnation of Israel’s Nazi barbarism against the people of Palestine and a cry for hope.
Israel is slowly but surely becoming a pariah nation across the world, in official circles and in the public mind. And that is happening even in nations with a long history of firm governmental and public support 1 for Israel. The unending vicious attacks on civilians and civilian facilities have caused revulsion among all but the extremist die-hard supporters of Israel and Zionism. In a hitherto unimaginable thing, by the end of September 2024, four US city councils had, with popular support, voted to divest from any entity doing business with Israel. In addition, the September 2024 UN General Assembly vote calling on Israel to abide by the ICJ ruling declaring the Israeli settlements in Palestine illegal under international law and issuing an order to vacate them gathered 124 supporters, 43 abstentions, and 14 opponents. Though the vote was not binding, it was a hugely symbolic one.
Symbolism is critical in politics to win the battle of images and ideas. The world condemnations of Israel, even if winning no immediate change in Israel’s actions, are part of a long-term plan for the defeat and isolation of Israel and the victory for the Palestinian people, which will allow them to occupy their homeland and exercise their right to self-determination.
Karim Hirji ends with a moving tribute to the Palestinian people. Despite all the losses, suffering and isolation they have endured for over seventy-five years, the people of Palestine remain unbowed. They remain resilient. Their spirit remains strong as they hug and sing to their children.
It is a spirit shining through the eyes of the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan. Pondering on a majestic tree ‘beaten down by the deluge’ Tuquan envisions a rebirth, a new, fine morning, on the horizon:
The Deluge and the Tree
When the Tree rises up, the branches
shall flourish green and fresh in the sun,
the laughter of the Tree shall blossom
beneath the sun
and birds shall return.
Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.
The birds shall return.
Fadwa Tuqan
Karim Hirji argues that in the end, the struggle for socialism is our greatest hope in the battle for the soul of humanity. Artificial Intelligence, Society, and Religion: Crossroads of Algorithm, Neoliberalism, and Faith is an inspiring and challenging book that will help strengthen the social movements of resistance throughout the world. It delegitimize the ideological lies of imperialism—from the crimes of Eugenics to the fantasy of a happy AI future. It takes us on a fascinating and challenging journey, warns us of the grave dangers ahead—and prepares us for the next stage of the lifetime battle for anti-imperialist and socialist humanity.
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