Abstract

As the prevailing marker of the development of human productive forces, and as utilised as a historical paradigm for the justification of artificial intelligence technologies as the necessary and eventual feature of human life, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is driven by cultural assumptions and intellectual presuppositions that are informed by the presently hegemonic Western intellectual heritage. The problem identified and elucidated in this chapter is that the epistemic status of this socio-industrial development is set asymmetrically against Africa. Africa does not produce but mainly consume and use these technologies that are designed and manufactured in alien cultural settings. I go further and highlight that this problem does not only have cultural and geo-political implications but also have fundamental existential ramifications, as the dynamics of human-technology interaction as unveiled by the post-phenomenological method indicate that technology does frame human self-knowledge and modes of sociality. Casting this as both an epistemological and socio-ontological crisis, this chapter declares that this status quo, the skewed appropriation of AI technologies by Africa, and the effects thereof constitute a status quaestionis, an imperative for critical systematic exploration.