A/HRC/44/57 the emerging digital technologies operate globally, including in contexts very far removed from this small region of North America. 16. Beyond market dominance, corporations serve as key intermediaries between Governments and their nations, with the capacity to significantly transform the situation of human rights. Technology produced by powerful global North corporations is created in a very specific political, economic, social and governance context. It can have egregious effects in other contexts, such as those in the global South. One example is the role that Facebook played in Myanmar.25 There are also concerns about the unregulated, and in some cases exploitative, terms on which data are extracted from individuals and nations in the global South, by profit-seeking corporate actors in the global North who cannot be held accountable.26 17. Emerging digital technology sectors, such as those in Silicon Valley, are characterized by a “diversity crisis” along gender and race lines,27 especially at the highest levels of decision-making. According to an important study of the field, “currently, large scale AI systems are developed almost exclusively in a handful of technology companies and a small set of elite university laboratories, spaces that in the West tend to be extremely white, affluent, technically oriented, and male. These are also spaces that have a history of problems of discrimination, exclusion, and sexual harassment.”28 The study further finds that “this is much more than an issue of one or two bad actors: it points to a systematic relationship between patterns of exclusion within the field of AI and the industry driving its production on the one hand, and the biases that manifest in the logics and application of AI technologies on the other.”29 Technology produced in such fields that disproportionately exclude women, racial, ethnic and other minorities is likely to reproduce these inequalities when it is deployed. Producing technology that works within complex social realities and existing systems requires understanding social, legal and ethical contexts, which can only be done by incorporating diverse and representative perspectives as well as disciplinary expertise.30 18. Market and economic forces exert a powerful influence on the design and use of emerging digital technologies, which in turn have a transformational effect on markets, even on capitalism itself.31 On the one hand, some economic influence seeks intentionally to promote discrimination and intolerance. Examples include wealthy individuals who fund online platforms advocating supremacist ideology. 32 On the other hand, the most powerful market forces may primarily seek profitable outcomes from emerging digital technologies without explicitly racist or intolerant intentions. But the evidence shows that profitable products can produce racial discrimination. Where economies are structured by racial and ethnic inequality – as is the case all over the world – profit maximization will typically be consistent with and in many cases reinforce or compound racial and ethnic inequality. 19. To a great extent, inequalities in access to and enjoyment of the benefits of emerging digital technologies track (a) geopolitical inequalities at the international level, and (b) patterns of racial, ethnic and gendered inequality within individual countries. 33 20. At the international level, countries in the global South lack the digital infrastructure that exists in the global North: active broadband subscription in the global South is less 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 6 See A/HRC/39/64. See, e.g., https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/3390/2020-crucial-year-fight-data-protectionafrica. See www.technologyreview.com/2018/02/14/145462/were-in-a-diversity-crisis-black-in-ais-founderon-whats-poisoning-the-algorithms-in-our; Noble, Algorithms of Oppression; and West, Whittaker and Crawford, “Discriminating systems”. West, Whittaker and Crawford, “Discriminating systems”, p. 6 (footnote omitted). Ibid. p. 7. Ibid. See, e.g., Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York, Public Affairs, 2019). See, e.g., https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1536504218766547. See, e.g., https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3403010.