Inclusive Futures: Radical Ethics and Transformative Justice for Responsible AI

A lecture about the possibility of "inclusive AI" by Professor Sanjay Sharma (University of Warwick).

This event is part of the MCCS Community Lectures series, hosted by the School of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths. It is free and open to all staff, students and members of the public.

Despite many seeing AI as an inevitable and objective force within society, it continues to be contested, with a host of issues raised across environmental, social, and legal domains, amongst others. One key area of AI critique is how this technology can both further and obscure neocolonial discourses and practices. Professor Sanjay Sharma examines race as a sociotechnical assemblage, with digital ecologies being one sphere which reinforce established assemblages but also as spaces for rethinking and resisting contemporary notions of whiteness and forces of racism. Professor Sharma will discuss the work of the BRAID Fellowship Project he leads on 'Inclusive Futures: Radical Ethics and Transformative Justice for Responsible AI'. This research takes an Afrofuturist and abolitionist approach to understanding AI, alongside the guiding principles from the ethics of care. As such, this project addresses an essential yet under-researched aspect of contemporary AI systems: their increasingly colonial and racialised ideologies. This talk will therefore ask: how can we re-imagine AI to be truly inclusive and, indeed, is this possible at all?

Sanjay Sharma is a Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, at the University of Warwick. He is the lead researcher on the BRAID Fellowship Project 'Inclusive Futures: Radical Ethics and Transformative Justice for Responsible AI' and has been the PI on the ESRC Digital Good Network’s ‘Re-Imaging AI with Afrofuturist Speculative Design’ project and the Warwick Institute of Engagement Collaboration and Co-Production’s ‘Race and AI’ project. He is the author of Understanding Digital Racism: Networks, Algorithms, Scale (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024).

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