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Artificial intelligence (AI) has skyrocketed in popularity in the past few years, often bringing with it controversy about how it drains our creativity and natural resources. 

However, AI is bringing waves of optimism too, especially from young people across the Global South who are reimagining how AI can disrupt current systems of inequality and promote greater connection and care. 

Propelling this research is Payal Arora, co-founder of the Inclusive AI Lab and FemLab and professor at Utrecht University. She is working to integrate diverse forms of data and historically marginalized perspectives into digital policies and designs to ensure that data reflects diverse human realities and can make space for humans and nature to live in greater harmony.

“Software without stories is a body without a soul. Many of us feel our phones are extensions of ourselves. What stops us from feeling the same with nature?”

To tackle this question, Arora has spent decades studying and drawing insights from low-income and Indigenous communities across the Global South, noting the inherent sustainability woven into the lifestyle of Indigenous Peoples.  

Arora challenges the insular focus of Western tech by pushing the importance of gathering and disseminating data with a human-centered approach by re-examining how the inclusion of historically marginalized people can create more equitable and well-rounded data and decision processes. 

“My vision for Earth begins with an honest reckoning: before we can speak of “human-centered” futures, we must confront how much of humanity has been systematically dehumanized.” 

“By centering historically excluded ways of knowing and living, we can move beyond narrow Western binaries of market growth versus environmental cost – and imagine futures grounded in care, continuity and collective survival.”

Arora is an award-winning author of several books, including The Next Billion Users and From Pessimism to Promise. In 2025, Arora was named among the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics, one of her many notable accolades.

Her forthcoming book, Library of the Incalculable, will be released in November 2026 with V2_Lab for the Unstable Media.