Ethics in Translation: AI Across Borders

Artificial Intelligence ethics is often framed in universal terms — but what happens when we look beyond the Western contexts that shape those frameworks? 

Join Professor Ishtiaque Ahmed (Department of Computer Science; Associate Director, KMDI) for an ABC Seminar exploring how AI systems extend colonial legacies and how community practices across the Global South reveal alternative ethical perspectives. 

Drawing from ethnographic and design research in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Canada, Ahmed examines the intersection of data, labour, and culture — and what it means to build truly equitable AI systems. 

This talk is part of the Algorithmic Bias in Canada (ABC) seminar series, housed at the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto.  

Abstract 

Artificial Intelligence ethics is often framed in universal terms, yet such framings obscure how cultural and material practices shape fundamentally different relationships with data. In many parts of the Global South, communities interact with AI not only as users but also as repairers, annotators, and mediators of fragile infrastructures, producing forms of engagement that Western discourses on AI ethics frequently miss. Based on my long-term ethnographic and design work across Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Canada, and other contexts, I will show how AI systems extend colonial legacies by imposing Western neoliberal values, how epistemic injustices emerge when local ways of knowing are rendered unintelligible, and how community practices such as informal data repair in Dhaka or immigrant struggles over data legitimacy in Canada reveal alternative ethical concerns. I will also highlight the growing data annotation industries in countries such as Bangladesh, India, and China, where labelling labour is promoted as a path to development but raises distinct worries around exploitation, recognition, and long-term sustainability. These accounts demonstrate that AI ethics cannot be disentangled from situated practices of data and labour, and that any attempt to globalize AI ethics must bring these lived realities to the fore to avoid reproducing the very exclusions it claims to resist.

About ABC  

ABC is a University of Toronto-based interdisciplinary research initiative focused on understanding and addressing algorithmic bias in Canada. 

Through academic collaboration, public engagement, and partnerships with industry, government, and Indigenous communities, we aim to promote understanding about the effects of algorithmic bias and to shape more equitable AI systems.