Decolonizing AI Ethics: Rethinking Governance From Below - Yousif Hassan
Digital technologies and AI systems often amplify structural discrimination and perpetuate colonial logics through biased design, unequal power dynamics, and exploitative practices. These dynamics reinforce global inequities and limit communities' agency in shaping their technological futures. The Towards a Decolonized Artificial Intelligence seminar series, organized by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan, critically examines these issues and explores strategies to rethink technologies through alternative design and use paradigms.
The last seminar of the series will host Yousif Hassan, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy and of Information at the School of Information of the University of Michigan.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is capturing the African imaginations as a gateway to progress and prosperity. Several actors in the continent including governments, scientists, entrepreneurs, and international development organizations are turning to AI to address long-standing socioeconomic challenges in the continent. On the other hand, African researchers highlight the gap in regulatory frameworks and policies that govern the development of AI in Africa. They argue that AI technology could exacerbate problems of inequalities and injustice in the continent. However, most of the literature on AI ethics is biased toward Euro-American perspectives and based on Western frameworks and epistemologies. They lack the understanding of how AI development is apprehended in the Global South, and particularly Africa. Drawing on case studies in the area of AI for development in the continent, Hassan argues for looking beyond the question of ethics in AI and examining AI governance issues through the analytical lens of coloniality and the political economy of technoscience to understand AI development in Africa. By doing so, this talk presents a different theorization for AI ethics from the South that is based on lived experiences of those in the margins and avoids the framing of technological futures that simplistically pathologize or celebrate Africa.
The event will consist of a 40' keynote followed by 20' for Q&A.
