Ubuntu as AI Compass for Healthy Human-AI Relationships
This keynote will address the issue of what is required of us as humanity to become relational cross-culturally, and therefore become better at relating with machines that flatten all our cultures into a predicted algorithm. The Ubuntu philosophy is the oldest known concept that defines what it means to be human and is captured in the saying, "I am because of who We are." In a time of global crises that touch every life on the planet, we are facing an unprecedented technological advancement happening faster than we can learn, reflect and relate. Ubuntu is the wisdom of relational intelligence. It breaks things down to a set of protocols for relating with chaos, uncertainty and new ways of being human together. Ubuntu philosophy is being applied to technoly at the design stage as a more ethical approach to creating solutions that solve real problems, while helping us maintain human dignity and a sense of belonging to one another. It is, as Desmond Tutu once declared, "Africa's gift to the world." This new version of Ubuntu cuts across cultures and geographies and attempts to bring peace and understanding in the technology space where there is a clash of values and ethics.
- Digital design
- People
- Real life
Speaker
Wakanyi Hoffman
Ubuntu Ethics Interpreter/ Director of Sustainable AI Ethics
Wakanyi Macharia-Hoffman is an African indigenous scholar born and raised in a forest in Kenya. She is an internationally recognised speaker working at the intersection of Ubuntu ethics to promote African relational intelligence in AI systems. She is the Director for Responsible AI at the Inclusive AI Lab at Utrecht University, where she interprets Ubuntu wisdom for AI designers. She founded the African Folktales Project, a digital knowledge commons that treats folktales as living archives of Indigenous relational ethics, ecological intelligence, and social knowledge, now serving over 24,000 teachers across the African continent on the Ubuntu Education Hub online platform. Her children’s books—including Sala, Mountain Warrior—extend this work through literature that dignifies African ancestral intelligence and heritage. As a senior fellow at The New Institute, she contributed to research on new conceptions of human flourishing, aimed at reformulating the Sustainable Development Goals. She sits on the advisory board of the IDG Foundation and the Global Citizens Assembly. She is a global nomad and mother of four who has lived in nine countries on four continents. She, her husband and children are currently spread out in the Netherlands, Japan and the US.
