Communicating AI and Disability

This chapter looks at a relatively new area of disability and communication: AI. It contends that discourses, language, and representation of disability in relation to AI need to be understood against the backdrop of evolving ideas of disability and technology. It critiques the dominant social imaginaries of AI and disability, which obscure the flaws in the mainstream ways that autonomous intelligent systems such as AI developed. The chapter concludes that AI and its dominant social imaginaries are in the throes of a severe crisis of legitimacy. Accordingly, alternative imaginaries are discussed as ways to reimagine and remake AI, machine learning, intelligent systems, and other technologies as sustainable, just, and conducive to the goals of extending accessibility, inclusion, participation, and rights for people with disabilities.