My book, Disabling Intelligences, is on the way from Palgrave MacMillan starting in October.
Why are the negative consequences of so-called AI so consistently directed at disabled and racialized people? Disabling Intelligences details the ongoing effects of the eugenicist mindset on our corporate ventures and our interpersonal relationships.
Eugenics is more than a failed social movement driving debunked and outdated race science. Eugenics was and remains a collection of beliefs that persist throughout our societies, undergird our scientific inquiry, and shape our public policy as well as our interpersonal relationships.
While AI products are still largely discussed as an eminent future transformation, they are increasingly pitched as new and immediate solutions to problems both profound and mundane. A new wave of AI hype has transformed the conditions for which any kind of algorithmic feature is described as AI.
Entrepreneurial culture has become an elite gambling scheme—any proposed product or service promised by startups is often a cover for extracting user data which is then sold as a speculative revenue prospect. The promised products, sometimes even medical devices which users have become dependent on, are then abandoned and the resources rolled into some other venture. Are we willing to bet it all on a project which has repeatedly broken its promises?
The desire for AI has been expressed as “taking away the tasks we hate.” But who designates contemptable tasks? And what does our contempt for this work say about how we regard the people who do it? A history of raced and gendered labor, combined with industrialization and the “Ghost Work” of the digital era have produced an Ideology of Replacement that promises the elimination of inconvenience without any concept of the human cost of convenience.
Our collective belief in our own inadequacy is required to sustain the AI project—a metaeugenic worship of intelligence and a belief that most people do not possess enough of it.
My intention is to provide readers with encouragement and empowerment through concrete actions that readers can take in their day to day, online, educational, and professional lives. Readers will come away from this text equipped with a clarity of perception and "a Just AI toolkit" for evaluating and resisting metaeugenics in technology.
https://link.springer.com/book/9783032026644
#eugenics #metaeugenics #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Disability
