S3 Ep1 From AfRICA to the World with Yavi Madurai: in conversation with MUTALE NKONDE

<p>Living and working in Africa - have you ever looked for a picture of something to use in a presentation, a video... maybe in stock images &nbsp;or general online, only to find mainly white people represented, whether it be hands, face, body, or hair.</p> <p>This is a direct result of algorithms being unintentionally or intentionally designed to be ‘blind’, but programmes written and designed by very little or no inclusivity of all types of humans of the human race, actually lead to online racism, discrimination, propaganda and even hate.</p> <p>This is where Artificial Intelligence becomes central to this discussion.</p> <p>Shaping intelligent technology around human and societal behaviours, norms, needs and current reality is the stage we’re at in human evolution with an anthropocentric view of technology. Technology SHOULD ALWAYS work for humans and not the other way around, and this means that there needs to be more inclusivity, more engagement and more representation when it comes to the technology industry.</p> <p>I studied AI Ethics a few years ago, and essentially ethics are guidelines created by policy makers, but when those policy makers and architectures of society, especially the online one are not representative, then see constraints on the intersection of technology meeting the human world, in security, autonomy, explicitness and most critically justice.</p> <p>Today is the international day of Social Justice and this years theme is A Call for Social Justice in the Digital Economy. In honour of this, I speak to <em><strong>Mutale Nkonde</strong></em>, the founding CEO of <em><strong>AI For the People (AFP)</strong></em> a non profit communications agency, an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center of Internet and Society at Harvard, a current fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford, starting her career as a broadcast journalist who produced documentaries for the BBC, CNN &amp; ABC. Prior to all of this, Mutale worked in AI Governance. During that time she was part of the team that introd