AI and Structural Injustice: A Feminist Perspective

Abstract

Browne explores the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to exacerbate structural injustice. First, she introduces the seminal account of structural injustice by the feminist theorist Iris Marion Young and discusses one of its definitive elements, ‘untraceability’. Drawing on Arendt’s concept of ‘thoughtlessness’ and the work of other scholars such as Benjamin, Browne goes on to consider structural injustice in relation to algorithmic decision making, which, itself, is becoming increasingly untraceable. Browne concludes with some suggestions on how we might think about mitigating the structural injustice that AI poses through democratic governance mechanisms. By way of example, she advocates adopting several elements of the mini-public approach within regulatory public-body landscapes to form a new pluralistic lay-centric ‘AI Public Body’.