The AI vs the World & Decolonizing AI MozFest 2022 Watchlist

In an ideal world, Artificial Intelligence would be truly universal, but the reality is that it’s embedded in the knowledge of the Global Majority. This means that the groups who have been racialized as ‘ethnic minorities’ including African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Black and Indigenous people, have, for the most part, been completely excluded from the development and implementation of AI, while Western perspectives have been accepted as objective universal truths.

Secure your On-Demand ticket to view the sessions below that speak to the problem of exclusion and the de-prioritisation of the needs outside of the White and Western dominated field of AI.

• With what words should I speak? Impact of Voice technology on Language Diversity
  Voice Technology touches so many domains in our lives from virtual assistants, accessing financial services, healthcare to automatic subtitle generation. Unfortunately, most languages in the world are not equally represented in voice technology. This session brings together language activists from low-resource languages, computational linguistics, and you to reflect on your experiences of voice technology.
  
  
• African Women in AI Project
  Today, conversations about the significance of Artificial Intelligence have expanded from a narrow focus on its importance to the economy to the potentially negative impact of the technology on social justice and equality. The goal of this session is to further discuss Policy's African Women in Artificial Intelligence Project (AWiAIP) which launched in October 2021 to spark conversation about Artificial Intelligence and Gender Equality in Africa.

• Designing Virtual Monuments For Public Spaces
  What do city officials, artists, and technologists need to consider when creating augmented reality, digital, and location-based monuments and artwork that are intended for display in public spaces? Join this session to find out.
  
  
• Facial Recognition Technology and the Spectre of Police Bias in India
  Facial recognition technology has been touted as the solution to crime in India with massive amounts of expenditure being incurred to procure this technology by State Police departments as well as the National Crime Records Bureau in India. However, is this technology capable of solving the historical issue of bias in policing? In this session we’ll review.
  
  
• Is AI holding up a Broken Mirror? SWANA and the fragmentation of AI Ambitions
  A huge element of operating as a SWANA woman in this world is the active exclusion of many things from their identity to acclimate to prominent power structures - a phenomenon also known as “code-switching”. AI has homogenized SWANA women further and focuses a fragmented lens on their personhood and identities. For AI to live up to any of its ambitions, it needs to integrate the so-called minorities, such as SWANA women.

• Decolonising Artificial Intelligence? A View From The South
  This workshop brings together civil society organisations and scholars from developing countries to consider what decolonisation means for them; whether and how it is possible; and the capacities and institutions that are needed to meaningfully shift power in our AI futures.
  
  
• Reclaiming AI Futures
  This session creates a space for interacting with the contributors to the art exhibition, 'Reclaiming AI Futures', curated by Mozilla Fellow, Divij Joshi. The contributors and the project curators discuss their work, the larger ideas motivating the project, and ways to build on and take forward the ideas of reclaiming AI futures.

The sessions above will be viewable until June 25th, so be sure to grab your On-Demand ticket to watch them (and all other recorded MozFest sessions) at a time that suits your schedule.