From Bad Users and Failed Uses to Responsible Technologies: A Call to Expand the AI Ethics Toolkit

Recent advances in artificial intelligence applications have sparked scholarly and public attention to the challenges of the ethical design of technologies. These conversations about ethics have been targeted largely at technology designers and concerned with helping to inform building better and fairer AI tools and technologies. This approach, however, addresses only a small part of the problem of responsible use and will not be adequate for describing or redressing the problems that will arise as more types of AI technologies are more widely used. Many of the tools being developed today have potentially enormous and historic impacts on how people work, how society organises, stores and distributes information, where and how people interact with one another, and how people's work is valued and compensated. And yet, our ethical attention has looked at a fairly narrow range of questions about expanding the access to, fairness of, and accountability for existing tools. Instead, I argue that scholars should develop much broader questions of about the reconfiguration of societal power, for which AI technologies form a crucial component. This talk will argue that AI ethics needs to expand its theoretical and methodological toolkit in order to move away from prioritizing notions of good design that privilege the work of good and ethical technology designers. Instead, using approaches from feminist theory, organization studies, and science and technology, I argue for expanding how we evaluate uses of AI. This approach begins with the assumption of socially informed technological affordances, or "imagined affordances" [1] shaping how people understand and use technologies in practice. It also gives centrality to the power of social institutions for shaping technologies-in-practice.