People with disabilities are often perceived as being “given” the opportunity to work, rather than “providing” valuable labor. Centering on disabled data workers as experts involved in the quotidian construction of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in China, this article shows that disability expertise and labor can afford a technical edge to AI systems in a certain political economy. In the case examined, the work of consistently synchronizing interpretations of the ambiguous data and elusive rules of smart home systems prefers a stable annotation workforce with coordinated cognition and trained judgment. This technical demand has come to be met by a committed team of skilled disabled workers, who are pushed out from mainstream job market by systemic ableism, and pulled in by disability-informed expertise that reconfigures space, time, and political economy to meet non-normative bodyminds. Through this exceptional case run by a disabled people led organization, I draw attention to disabled people’s under-examined role as system-builders of information technologies as opposed to users, victims, or inspirations, and highlight the transformative potential of disability expertise.
more »
« less
From a figment of your imagination: Disabled marginal cases and underthought experiments
Abstract Philosophers often enroll disabled bodies and minds as objects of thought in their arguments from marginal cases and in thought experiments: for example, arguments for animal ethics use cognitively disabled people as a contrast case, and Merleau-Ponty uses a blind man with a cane as an exemplar of the relationship of technology to the human, of how technology mediates. However, these philosophers enroll disabled people without engaging significantly in any way with disabled people themselves. Instead, disabled people are treated in philosophy as literal objects—and in many cases, as less than human. (This sense of a categorical difference between disabled and nondisabled people is becoming especially clear during the Covid-19 pandemic, as I write this article.) Philosophical reflection thus makes assumptions—often wrong—about disabled people’s lives, experiences, and relationships to technology. Outside of philosophy as well as in, disabled people are not regarded as experts about our own experiences and lives; our testimony is paternalistically written over. We need better consideration of disabled people as people as we consider the future. Lack of disabled people’s points of view in philosophy colors—and sometimes invalidates—views of technological change.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1750260
- PAR ID:
- 10254010
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Human Affairs
- Volume:
- 30
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1210-3055
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 608 to 616
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Trans technology – technology created to help address challenges that trans people face – is an important area for innovation that can help improve marginalized people’s lives. We conducted 104 interviews with 115 creators of trans technology to understand how they involved trans people and communities in design processes. We describe projects that used human-centered design processes, as well as design processes that involved trans people in smaller ways, including gathering feedback from users, conducting user testing, or the creators being trans themselves. We show how involving trans people and communities in design is vital for trans technologies to realize their potential for addressing trans needs. Yet we highlight a frequent gap between trans technology design and deployment, and discuss ways to bridge this gap. We argue for the importance of involving community in trans technology design to ensure that trans technology achieves its promise of helping address trans needs and challenges.more » « less
-
How do humans build and navigate their complex social world? Standard theoretical frameworks often attribute this success to a foundational capacity to analyze other people’s appearance and behavior to make inferences about their unobservable mental states. Here we argue that this picture is incomplete. Human behavior leaves traces in our physical environment that reveal our presence, our goals, and even our beliefs and knowledge. A new body of research shows that, from early in life, humans easily detect these traces—sometimes spontaneously—and readily extract social information from the physical world. From the features and placement of inanimate objects, people make inferences about past events and how people have shaped the physical world. This capacity develops early and helps explain how people have such a rich understanding of others: by drawing not only on how others act but also on the environments they have shaped. Overall, social cognition is crucial not only to our reasoning about people and actions but also to our everyday reasoning about the inanimate world.more » « less
-
Tropes about disability, stereotyped views and biased visions of what disabled life is, often occupy - haunt, maybe - the ways in which technologies related to disability are designed, marketed, and shared. Technology is then taken as a redemptive power for that which demanded an answer or solution or some means of address. There are two errors in our traditional narratives -- (1) we get stories about technology wrong, and (2) we get stories about disability wrong, both of these because of how we talk about disability technology. I’m interested in telling better stories about technology and disability, some of these in the service of better technology, better design -- but really in service of disability community and disabled flourishing.more » « less
-
AI systems are often used to make or contribute to important decisions in a growing range of applications, including criminal justice, hiring, and medicine. Since these decisions impact human lives, it is important that the AI systems act in ways which align with human values. Techniques for preference modeling and social choice help researchers learn and aggregate peoples' preferences, which are used to guide AI behavior; thus, it is imperative that these learned preferences are accurate. These techniques often assume that people are willing to express strict preferences over alternatives; which is not true in practice. People are often indecisive, and especially so when their decision has moral implications. The philosophy and psychology literature shows that indecision is a measurable and nuanced behavior---and that there are several different reasons people are indecisive. This complicates the task of both learning and aggregating preferences, since most of the relevant literature makes restrictive assumptions on the meaning of indecision. We begin to close this gap by formalizing several mathematical indecision models based on theories from philosophy, psychology, and economics; these models can be used to describe (indecisive) agent decisions, both when they are allowed to express indecision and when they are not. We test these models using data collected from an online survey where participants choose how to (hypothetically) allocate organs to patients waiting for a transplant.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1515/humaff-2020-0054
