Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We Are Wrong about AI

This book discusses the influences of eugenics on the AI industry and the impacts of AI opportunism on disabled people. Why are the negative consequences of so-called AI so consistently directed at disabled and racialized people? Disabling Intelligences answers this question by detailing the ongoing effects of the eugenicist mindset on our corporate ventures and our interpersonal relationships. It offers an accessible guide to the various meanings, methods, and impacts of AI, and provides a clear framework for classifying, categorizing, evaluating, and critiquing AI projects. Bridging the gap between STS and critical disability studies, the author centers disabled experiences to present a novel framework that helps readers transform their understandings of citizenship, consumerism, social movements, journalism, engineering, research, and scholarship. An ideal reading for academics at all levels interested in AI technologies across the social sciences and humanities, as well as engineering and computer science, this groundbreaking short monograph challenges our understanding and assumptions about technology, encompassing the history of AI and disability from popular culture to real-life case-studies. Readers will come away from this text equipped with a clarity of perception and a toolkit for evaluating and resisting metaeugenics in technology.

Rua M. Williams is Assistant Professor of User Experience Design at Purdue University in Indiana, USA, and Just Tech Fellow with the Social Science Research Council, where they research disabled people’s bodily autonomy and social agency through adaptive and assistive technologies. Dr. Williams uses feminist and anti-racist approaches to Technoscience, Critical Disability Studies, and Science and Technology Studies to denounce injustice in technology and uplift marginalized users’ practices of resistance.