A pluralistic view on AI ethics: perspectives from Buen Vivir

Abstract Cosmovisions of the Global South need to find a place in AI regulation, dominated by the Global North, to contextualize AI and to foster pluralistic global ethical AI. The worldwide UNESCO recommendation for the ethics of AI incorporates flourishing of all life, but still takes a human centric/rights approach. Indigenous Buen Vivir fosters circular, biocentric, participatory, thinking focusing on equality, integrality of life and rights of Nature. Buen Vivir demands a biocentric whole-of system approach across the tech stack; addressing unequal power relations and economic inequality by AI, going beyond ensuring non-discrimination. It highlights participatory consensus decision-making for AI with a voice for nature. Work is considered as giving meaning to life, and social bonds and community as cardinal for human wellbeing. This puts into question the tendency to implement AI to make human work and relations redundant. Buen Vivir can help programmers of quantum computers think in three-some (complementary opposition) instead of binary opposition, a topic for future research.