Talk: Cyborg Meets AI: Technologized Disabled People in the Context of Corporatized Technological Development and Health Management

There are many dangers of having parts of your body owned, managed, or maintained by companies and/or managed care -- to be cyborg is to be tracked and surveilled as a regular feature of being a disabled person. I'll speak about state programs that use electronic visit verification for personal attendant care, about a bionic eye company that went belly up (and left people without sight), about a company that shifted away from a product for lower income folks and left people with unusable cochlear implants in their heads (and no support for repair or replacement), about social media surveillance in denying people disability benefits, about where increased use of AI will overlook some disabled people and look extra hard at others (with implications for education, jobs, and public life). Some of these cases are to help us think about future AI (and don't constitute AI themselves), but I think are important to understanding the context of being disabled in our society, and regularly living with and relying on technologies. We need historical and lived context for considering, evaluating, and setting prudent policies forth for AI development.

Ashley Shew is an associate professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. Her current research sits at the intersection of technology studies, biotech ethics, and disability studies.

Organized by the Human Context of Science and Technology program and the Critical Disability Studies Minor.  Cosponsored by Accessibility and Disabilities Services, the Designing Participatory Futures Lab, the Department of English, the Department of Media and Communication Studies, the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health, and the Global Studies Program.