Technology, Employment and Wellbeing

This issue brings together contributions from the Inclusive AI Lab, a cross-sectoral global initiative dedicated to nurturing leadership and advancing inclusive and sustainable Artificial Intelligence across data, tools, services, and platforms, with a particular focus on the Global South.

Artificial Intelligence continues to reshape everyday life in profound ways, offering significant potential to address pressing societal challenges. However, this promise can only be realised if the structural inequities embedded in the coding, training, and deployment of AI systems are actively recognised and confronted.

In the first article, Guanqin He demonstrates the essential role of human infrastructure in the development of AI, challenging the myth of self-building systems and calling for meaningful improvements to the exploitative labour conditions that underpin the industry.

Turning to the culturally charged world of memes, the second article by Lucie Chateau and Beatrice Murch explores the possibilities and challenges of archiving memes, ultimately arguing for an approach grounded in creative data justice.

In the third article, Siddhi Gupta and Payal Arora reflect on the Inclusive AI Lab’s collaborative efforts to diversify open-source datasets in the age of AI by centring marginalised communities. In doing so, they examine both the opportunities for participatory representation and the limitations such initiatives continue to encounter.

The fourth article, by Kirthi Jayakumar, Jensine Larsen, and Payal Arora, investigates how digital tools can support survivors of gender-based violence. The authors present a range of existing approaches while emphasising the potential of contemporary technologies to help dismantle systemic violence.

Drawing on her own experiences, Rana Kuseyri highlights in the fifth article how algorithmic discrimination can emerge through the rigid standardisation of digital welfare systems, effectively pressuring recipients to suppress or omit crucial information in order to remain eligible for support.