Ashley Shew

Associate Professor, Department of Science, Technology, and Society, Virginia Tech

Join us for a talk by Dr. Shew related to her new book, Against Technoablism.

Abstract:  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.