Mis/trust, language, and ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in global digital economies

The digitalisation of global economies has fostered anxieties about the trustworthiness of so- called ‘Artificial Intelligence’ technologies and their implications for interpersonal and institutional forms of trust and mistrust. But what exactly does mis/trust in ‘AI’ entail? And how does mis/trust in computational systems relate to other forms of mis/trust between human beings? This paper tackles these questions by bringing the intellectual and technical history of computation in dialogue with the ways in which Ekegusii and Kiswahili speakers based in Southwest Kenya conceptualise trust and mistrust. Doing so generates fresh scope for analysing AI-driven digitalisation as grounded in linguistic forms and semiotic ideologies which mediate both the use and the design of computational technologies.