Africa in the Fourth Industrial Revolution : a status quaestionis, from the cultural to the phenomenological

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 this 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 here go further and highlight that this problem does not only have cultural and geopolitical implications, but that it has fundamental existential ramifications, as the dynamics of human-technology interaction as unveiled by the postphenomenological method indicate that technology does frame human self-knowledge and modes of sociality. Casting this as both an epistemological and socio-ontological crisis, the chapter declares that this status quo, the skewed appropriation of A.I. technologies by Africa, and the effects thereof, constitute a status quaestionis, an an imperative for critical systematic exploration