Contextualizing ethics: Perspective on the African relevance of AI ethics

• In Event: A forum on Africa in AI ethics and policies

Proposal

As previous technology, AI advances have the potential to alter society unexpectedly (Abrams, 2024). While AI has the potential to increase productivity and efficiency with the automation of tasks, which can lead to cost savings, growth for businesses, and enable the development of new products and services such as art, entertainment, transportation, and healthcare (Luxton & Watson, 2023), there are also negative impacts on the society. For instance, the potential loss of jobs due to the growing prevalence of AI in various industries, which will negatively affect workers’ financial well-being (Luxton & Watson, 2023). Furthermore, AI can perpetuate and amplify biases and prejudices, which can lead to discriminatory treatments of certain groups (Wee & Findlay, 2020). In effect, AI has the potential of psychological harm with the loss of human values such as empathy, agency, self-reliance, and pride in one’s work (Luxton & Watson, 2023). Given the potential of AI to impact society, concerns about ethical issues in the use and application of AI are ever relevant. Ethics considers questions related to what is wrong and right. Yet, wrong and right are informed by culture and do not rest on invariable core values, not influenced by one's environment (Chang, 2012). However, concerns about ethics in AI have often been driven by western thoughts in western contexts.In other words, AI ethics and the establishment of AI ethical standards have mostly rested on western ethical thinking. In this paper, we problematize the cultural relevance of current AI ethical standards. We examine how culture intersects with current AI ethics, or code of ethics developed by various organizations; and how non-western cultures such as African culture can interface with AI ethics and the implication of such interaction in the development of AI ethics standards.

Authors

• Tutaleni I Asino

• Rebecca Y Bayeck, Utah State University