Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how graduates in machine learning and data science at Ghanian Universities are positioned as paying dividends to two dominant narratives of technological promise and demographic growth, and how in response, they retool and redirect AI to craft a multiplicity of urban futures.

Paper long abstract:

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science (referred to collectively as AI hereafter) are taking off in African cities forging new kinds of labour, infrastructure, economies, and social relationships. In Accra, Ghana productivity, opportunity, and crises shape AI. With the entry of Google’s privately owned fibreoptic pipeline, paradoxically named Equiano after the abolitionist freed slave, the expansion of data infrastructures attracts extractivist racial capital aimed at privatising urban services and standardising urban space, while also providing opportunities to radicalise technologies and create improvisational and new material ways of getting by. A new generation of young people are being trained in coding, machine learning, and data science for entry into digital labour markets. Younger generations born and raised in Accra are challenged by the affordances of city life and entangled in policy discourses of data imperialism and urban ruination. At the same time, they exploit opportunities through hustle economies and maker communities to reclaim urban space and earn a living in ways that countervail the globalising reach of technology industries and the wider discourses of survivalism. Based on ethnographic research in Accra, this paper explores how two dominant narratives framing Africa’s future, technological promise and demographic growth, converge in the present day. Young people are positioned as paying dividends to both these narratives, and yet we know very little about how they design and use AI to carve out their own futures in rapidly changing urban environments.