A new paper led by Gates Cambridge Scholars Abdullah Hasan Safir has found that the global South voice is on the sidelines in the field of AI ethics.
AI Ethics' global project shows that it is unable to provide the promise of universally useful by alienating the vast majority of the world in the South as “other people.”
Abdullah Hasan Safir et al
Gates Cambridge Scholar is the first author of the paper to show how AI Ethics stands by the global South Voice, reinforcing alienation.
the study, Distributed and cognitive injustice in AI ethics: A joint production account for global North and South politics in knowledge productionpublished by the Computing Machinery Association and is based on a study of nearly 6,000 AI Ethics Publications between 1960 and 2024. Its first author is Abdullah Hasan Safir [2024 – pictured above]has a PhD in multidisciplinary design. Other co-authors include Gates Cambridge scholar Ramit Debnass [2018] Kelly McKinnerney [2017].
The findings were recently presented at the ACCT conference of ACM, which is considered one of the top AI ethics conferences in the world. They show that Global North experts are now justifying AI ethics expertise through dynamic citation and collaboration practices in knowledge production within the field, including AI ethics co-quoting and institutions.
For example, studies of the distribution of research output in AI ethics suggest an “unbalanced proportion.” Of the top 50, four are in Australia and two institutions in Asia. The remaining 44 institutions are located in Europe or North America, and include universities, research wings of high-tech companies such as Microsoft and IBM, and public research institutes such as the Alan Turing Institute. There are no institutions in Latin or Central America, Sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle East and North Africa Region (MENA).
The author states: “Collectively, it shapes discourse and institutional methods of understanding at the heart of the ethical development of AI technologies around the world. This technopolitics of knowledge creation in AI ethics leads to creating epistemic injustice in the global South.”
“AI Ethics' global project shows that it is unable to provide the promise of universally useful by alienating the vast majority of the world in the South as “other people.” ”
*Read the paper here.
