Eugenics is more than a failed social movement, driving debunked and outdated race science.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. Dr. Rua Williams from Purdue University will explore how implementations of AI systems manifest many kinds of eugenics, from overt to covert, through the concept of Metaeugenics—the internalized beliefs that drive eugenic behaviors at the personal, interpersonal, and political levels. 

A new digital divide is forming between those who have the privilege to opt out of artificial services and those who are forced into the labor that sustains them. This proliferation is enabled by a metaeugenic worship of intelligence and a belief that most people do not possess enough of it. Our collective belief in our own inadequacy is required to sustain the AI project. Dr. Williams will prepare attendees to critically evaluate the motivations and consequences of the emerging and pervasive AI systems that claim to sell us a utopia while sustaining personal and environmental devastation. Dr. Williams will provide an analytical tool for understanding the premises of an AI project, unmasking its false promises, and, within the bounds of your role in relation to this project, devising the possible actions you can take to build a better world.

Organized by the Human Context of Science and Technology program and the Critical Disability Studies Minor; co-sponsored by Accessibility & Disability Services and the Designing Participatory Futures Research Lab.

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.