Why AI Cannot Be an Agent of Equality: A Critique of Technological Utopianism and the Category Error of Algorithmic Justice

Abstract

This paper presents a critique of the argument that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to overcome social hierarchies and achieve equality. It contends that this position is misguided insofar as it commits a category error by confusing epistemic automatism with moral agency. This study challenges the separation of instrumental and moral rationality, as well as formal and substantive equality, to demonstrate how, despite popular imagination and representations of neutrality, AI functions to reify existing hierarchical systems while obscuring the range of human choices made about its design and deployment. The idea of AI as a leveler is a secular feat of metaphysical illusion in the tradition that Nietzsche criticized: projecting justice onto a bodiless future of technology. The paper argues that algorithmic optimization cannot replace normative judgment, ethical deliberation, and political action, which are necessary for true equality.