B’AI Global Forum: Research on norms, ethics and praxis for a truly gender equal society and a guarantee of rights for minorities in the AI age

The B’AI Global Forum searches for effective ways to realize our social goal of creating a gender-equal society and guaranteeing minority rights in the era where AI pervades every aspect of our lives. Today’s world faces serious challenges, with ever-continuing economic gap and discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and gender. In particular, as the forms of communication mediated by digital technologies have become increasingly conspicuous in all realms of society including politics, economy and culture, especially since the spread of COVID-19 in 2020, the economic gap and discriminations are said to be worsening throughout the world. In order to confront such social challenges, our project questions the fundamental values of modernity that have prioritized the progress of science and technology, and also promotes the intellectual endeavor to understand the formation of the contemporary social institutions and organizational structure. We plan to do this by collaborating with researchers, practitioners, journalists and other citizens to identify current problems and seek and propose solutions so that the latest technology such as AI may enrich every human life. We decided to title our project the “B’AI Global Forum.” The “B’” represents our intention to pay attention to the history of discourse and representation before AI, various competing interests behind the development of AI, and the structure beneath AI. In other words, the name of our project shows our goal of conducting a multi-perspective analysis on the history and social structure that produced and enabled modern technologies such as AI.

SoftBank