Much excellent work has documented how contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) systems reinforce and deepen historical inequalities and oppressions. Further work remains, however, on whether and how AI systems can do otherwise. Recent social movements within AI research have begun to politicize AI technologies and their entanglements with social justice, power relations, and environmentalism (see, for example, #TechWontBuiltIt and recent ACM special issues on “AI Activism” and “Green AI”). In a current technology ecosystem dominated by commercial and military interests, however, few possibilities seem to exist for AI practitioners to “strive towards good relations” among humans, technologies, and environments.
This panel seeks to investigate how theories, methods, and ways of knowing from decades of feminist STS scholarship can inform the study of AI systems as they are used today. In Alison Adam’s (1995) feminist critique of AI epistemology, she emphasizes the need for more concrete examples of a “successor science” based on feminist epistemology and social constructivism to ground AI research. What would “successor AI” look like, built on feminist principles of situated knowledges and standpoint theory? Beyond universalized, depoliticized notions of “ethical AI,” might an analysis using feminist STS ground AI systems in complex sociotechnical entanglements and particular histories, geographies, communities, and contexts?
This panel invites work that engages with these questions and imagines new possibilities for feminist AI technologies. Topics can include, but are not limited to, the following:
* Social and political movements that aim to centre ethics of care, entanglement, relationality, and responsibility in human-AI systems
* Indigenous, Black, feminist, and queer conceptualizations of “artificial intelligence”
* Disability studies, feminist STS, and artificial intelligence
* Ecofeminism, environmental justice, “green AI” and environmental impacts of AI systems
* Standpoint theory and the politics of image, speech, and emotion recognition systems
* Intersections and contradictions between feminist health projects and AI in healthcare
* New methods and imagined futures for feminist, de-/anti-colonial, anti-military, anti-carceral, anti-capitalist AI
