Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Since the development of regional and world economies, driven by international communication, trade and the introduction of power-driven machinery in the late eighteenth century, the passions and inventive nature of humankind have forged ahead toward creating utopian silos of nation states and temporal domains distinguished by government ideologies and sustainable societal compacts with its citizens. The evolution from the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions brought us to the Fourth Industrial Revolution of disruptive technologies and trends like the Internet, social media, artificial intelligence, and robotics—sometimes called World 4.0. The impact of these societal transformations on legal principles and citizen protections in First World countries like the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia, because of their capitalistic, industrial, political, and economic interests will be disruptive and present particular challenges to “minority” populations of these countries. This paper focuses on the status and survival of people of the African diaspora in World 4.0, a total population of more than 100 million throughout the Americas. The largest population of these people (over 42 million) with predominately African ancestry, live in the United States; Brazil’s African diaspora population numbers more than 14 million. Solutions and strategies supported by literature review-based research and analysis are presented in this paper for addressing deleterious issues involving the impact of World 4.0 technologies on African diaspora.