Big Data, AI, and Emerging Technologies and Impacts for Persons with Disabilities: Global Minority Focus (North, South, East)

Social protection advances in AI, big data and technological innovation in relation to the rights of persons with disabilities sit within a continuum of beneficence and harm. There are multiple factors that create the potential for injury and harm for persons with disabilities that are associated with the strategic purpose and intent of such technologies and/or the design. This is particularly the case for persons with disabilities from highly marginalised and stigmatised communities, such as racial, ethnic and religious minority communities in addition to nomadic and oral cultures, including but not limited to, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller populations, where there has been and remains long standing intergenerational communal violence, forced assimilation and, targeted state persecution. This synopsis outlines a core set of factors for consideration alongside providing potential key principles to inform regulatory oversight and justice to ensure fair, just and equitable application within social protection regimes. Unfortunately, due to the lack of available research on these matters outside of the Global North, and even within the Global North in relation to minority communities, many of these suggested risks, injury and harms are surmised based upon historical treatment of persons with disability and minority community and personhood status. Thus, we advocate strongly for further research and investigation for such communities and peoples, and extended, systematic, and properly inclusive data and statistics, as disability remains disproportionately prevalent across minority communities due to longstanding discrimination and inequalities, communal and state violence, experienced by these groups. Current data and statistics gathering and analysis on digital technologies, such as that undertaken by ITU, agencies such as G3ICT, as well as UNESCO in relation to Internet Universality ROAM-X Indicators (Souter & Van der Spug, 2019), fall well short of providing the information and evidence base necessary in relation to the full range of diverse disability global – especially in minority communities (Goggin, 2022). We simply know very little about how people with disabilities experience, consume, gain access to, or are affected by emerging technologies such as apps, Internet of Things, Automated Decision Making, AI, let alone the contexts in which they do encounter or rely upon these (Goggin, Ellis, & Hawkins, 2019).