On August 14, 2026, DCN member Adio-Adet Dinika, Ph.D appeared as a guest on the 74th episode of Rebecca Mbaya’s interview series “The African Innovators Series”. The title of the interview is “Dr. Adio-Adet Dinika on the Labor AI Refuses to Name.”

How much human labor goes into artificial intelligence? That is the central question of the interview. It examines how data workers help develop AI systems and what labor and power dynamics are associated with this work. Dinika advocates for greater involvement of the people behind AI in its design and regulation, arguing that the issue is not only whether these workers are paid fairly or protected from harm. It is also whether the people whose judgement helps produce machine intelligence have any authority over what that intelligence becomes. As such, his approach links issues of the digital workplace with global inequality and decolonial perspectives on technology.

The full interview can be read here.

Adio-Adet Dinika, Ph.D, is a decolonial scholar of AI labour and governance whose work examines the people, infrastructures, and power relations behind the systems we increasingly treat as autonomous.