A/HRC/57/70 of Science and Technology, and the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences has developed Masters and PhD programmes in AI, machine learning, mathematics, and data science. Many western Big Tech firms have opened AI labs in Africa, including Microsoft in Nairobi in 2020, Google in Accra in 2018, and IBM in Nairobi in 2018 and in Johannesburg in 2016. He provided examples of how the past few years had seen a growing number of AI startups across the continent, albeit isolated and small scale. In Ghana, AI and digitalization initiatives have developed the Biometric Ghana Card, a multi-purpose biometric national identification card for day-to-day electronic and physical transactions; 11 a digital address system; drone delivery of medical products, and AI systems to help farmers track weather patterns. Challenges to AI development in Africa included low investment in R&D, lack of relevant skills, and that there was a need for supportive policies and robust infrastructure to enable Africa to benefit fully from AI,12 he explained. He added that most African countries lacked the financial, technological, and institutional capacity to drive AI development, and that this was due to how the Continent’s development had been undermined by foreign, imperialist interests, including by the international financial architecture, which contributed to disinvestment in social sectors such as education. 24. Joe Atkinson, University of Southampton, focused on “Human Rights at Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”. He explained that governance by AI and algorithmic decisionmaking (ADM) has emerged as a new form of ‘governance by numbers’ in both public and private sectors. ADM was being used by governments for a wide range of decisions relating to policing, immigration, housing and social security. It was also being used by corporations for targeted advertising and recommendations, and personal pricing. Mr. Atkinson detailed the use of AI in automation and algorithmic management in areas such as recruitment, in prescreening, CV sifting, and interview analysis; in route planning, and scheduling allocation (e.g., platforms/apps); in evaluation, to monitor tasks and performance, algorithmic ratings and assessments (e.g., call centers); and to discipline, such as suspending low scoring workers, altering access to shifts, and reliance on algorithmic metrics in dismissals and redundancies. Automation could, eventually, lead to a level of job destruction and work scarcity that undermines the right to work, he pointed out, in which case, policies designed to protect the right to work would be needed. Such protections could entail limiting the automation of specific tasks or jobs; policies that spread work across more people; and job guarantee schemes. He further explained that tech also threatened equality at work, underlining that algorithmic management posed a serious threat to the right to non-discrimination, and that this could be the result of assumptions or bias of engineers; inaccurate or incomplete data, leading to errors or biases; and replication or amplification of existing inequalities. This problem was compounded by a lack of transparency and accountability over the design and implementation of algorithmic tools. Tech also posed a threat to the right to just and fair working conditions in numerous ways. Algorithmic management undermined just conditions by enabling avoidance of employment law protections. Surveillance and intensification of work creates health and safety risks. It heightens the level of control over and subordination of workers. It also enables the deskilling of work, he added, emphasizing that the overall effect was to recommodify and dehumanize work. 25. Professor Isak Nti Asare, Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University, drawing from Johan Galtung’s 1969 work, 13 focused on the application of positive peace in building governance mechanisms for AI and emerging technologies. He underscored the understanding that technology is a product of the underlying society from which it is conceived, which includes attitudes, structures and institutions. He warned that inequalities in contemporary technological tools and systems are predicated on the consolidation of power in the digital economy among a few tech companies, and that we could not expect anything less from such a primordial environment of structural inequality. He expounded this fundamental relationship by emphasizing that the current global focus on a paradigm of harm mitigation within the digital ecosystem addressed the symptoms of an 11 12 13 See https://register.nia.gov.gh/. United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace and Peace Research”, Journal of Peace Research, Vol 6:3 (1969): 168. 7