ABSTRACT
Our ethnographic exploration with Ju|’hoansi people in Namibia uncovered qualities of cause-and-effect reasoning that are not articulated in either designing AI or school mathematics curricula. We created a game of chance using paper spinners and related the game to Ju|’hoansi people’s stories. This showed that numbers can associate with expectations, such as about animal behaviour, and temporal registers can distinguish events, express the embodiment of time and contribute to anticipation. Since the mathematical abstractions used to describe probability do not express such qualities, we suggest that combining participatory ethnographic methods with computational expertise can help to make AI more inclusive and explainable.
