“This robot is dictating her next steps in life”: disability justice and relational AI ethics

As automated technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making (ADM), become integral to social life, there is growing concern about their ethical implications. While issues of accountability, transparency, and fairness dominate discussions on “ethical” AI, little attention has been given to how socially disadvantaged groups most impacted by ADM systems form ethical judgments about them. Drawing on insights from relational ethics, this study uses dialogue groups with disabled people to explore how people distinguish between ‘more just’ or ‘less just’ uses of technology, and the contextual, situational, and relational factors that shape these judgments. For the dialogue group participants in our study, ethical reasoning was most strongly influenced by concerns about how ADM systems affect self-determination, caring relationships and identity recognition, and about the political–economic drivers of automation. The article contributes to AI ethics by empirically demonstrating that justice and ethics depend on the social relationships valued in different contexts and what is at stake, both personally and politically, in decisions aided by automation.