Whose AI future?

ARTIFICIAL intelligence is advancing at extraordinary speed, but at the 7th Annual Artificial Intelligence for Information Accessibility (AI4IA) Conference, the bigger question was decidedly human: Who gets to participate in the AI future, and who gets left behind? That conversation reached around the world on September 28, with 485 unique viewers and attendees joining from 105 countries and territories across six continents for a three-hour exchange spanning AI, education, health care, human rights, justice, media, language, and digital inclusion. Held on the International Day for Universal Access to Information, the conference was also a legacy event marking the 25th anniversary of UNESCO’s Information for All Programme (IFAP) — turning the milestone into a discussion not simply about how far technology has come, but about who has the power to shape where it goes next. From the Caribbean and Africa to Asia, Latin America, Europe and beyond, the discussion brought perspectives from regions and communities that can too easily sit at the receiving end of technologies developed elsewhere, a release from the Broadcasting Commission of Jamaica (BCJ) said. The conference was convened through UNESCO IFAP’s Working Group on Information Accessibility, chaired by Jamaican Cordel Green, executive director of the BCJ. UNESCO...