From Data Protection to Data Justice: Redressing the uneven distribution of opportunities and harms in AI

Research ICT Africa

As artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) move towards becoming general purpose technologies increasingly traversing every area of life, ensuring that their deployment does not perpetuate historical injustices and structural inequalities is a public policy priority ( Birhane, 2020). Without rights-preserving frameworks for the governance of data as the key input in such advanced technologies and the governance of the algorithms used to analyse and process the data, the uneven distribution of opportunities – and benefits, harms and risks – already evident with AI and ML deployment will intensify.