The History of AI in Thailand: Thickening Our Vision of AI by Caring for a Marginalised Actor

The first steps of artificial intelligence (AI) in Thailand can be traced back to Thai university course material from 1975. Around the mid-1980s, the Thai government started to acknowledge the potential of AI technology to become a driver for economic development. Yet, despite the benefits of monitoring AI’s domestic developments, such research remains scarce for Thailand. This paper seeks to fill this current literature gap through offering a centralised compilation of information about the unfolding of AI technology in Thailand from its beginnings to this day. Given the scarcity in written forms of publicly available knowledge, we enrich the available literature with three qualitative expert interviews, and we contextualise Thailand’s case within the broader Southeast Asian and Asian context. Thailand is regularly overlooked or marginalised when we ‘think AI’. However, we will understand that Thailand’s role in AI’s history is critical if willing to ‘thicken’ existing descriptions of AI. Reductivist understandings of AI might speak of a technology transfer of the 1970s from the Occident to Thailand and stop there. However, firstly, this obscures China’s growing influence over Thailand’s AI development since 2015. Secondly, this obscures Thailand’s necessarily participative role in AI’s development—both within Thailand and abroad—which thus contrasts with the understanding where Thailand would purely be subjected to ‘foreign’ influence in this technology transfer. Reviewing the history of AI in Thailand allows to add critically missing layers to our currently too partial understanding of the history of AI globally. We also hope to insufflate new air into this musty research avenue to further improve our understanding of Thailand’s contemporary sociotechnical unfoldment.