Ethnographic artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence research is seldom conducted ethnographically. Nevertheless, the field itself has a distinctive culture – an engineering imaginary within which ‘general intelligence’ is considered to be a phenomenon that can be both defined and tested by reference to some universal (probably mathematical) standard. This paper describes a research agenda that sets out to question those assumptions, through a programme of ethnographic field work, collaborating with computer scientists and educators in several countries of sub-Saharan Africa.