Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI

by Rua M. Williams

This book discusses the influences of eugenics on the AI industry and the impacts of AI opportunism on disabled people. Why are the negative consequences of so-called AI so consistently directed at disabled and racialized people? Disabling Intelligences answers this question by detailing the ongoing effects of the eugenicist mindset on our corporate ventures and our interpersonal relationships. It offers an accessible guide to the various meanings, methods, and impacts of AI, and provides a clear framework for classifying, categorizing, evaluating, and critiquing AI projects. Bridging the gap between STS and critical disability studies, the author centers disabled experiences to present a novel framework that helps readers transform their understandings of citizenship, consumerism, social movements, journalism, engineering, research, and scholarship.
 
An ideal reading for academics at all levels interested in AI technologies across the social sciences and humanities, as well as engineering and computer science, this groundbreaking short monograph challenges our understanding and assumptions about technology, encompassing the history of AI and disability from popular culture to real-life case-studies. Readers will come away from this text equipped with a clarity of perception and a toolkit for evaluating and resisting metaeugenics in technology.

Genres: Disability, Nonfiction

149 pages, Hardcover

Published September 27, 2025

Reviews

[Amy Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great writing here about the relationship between technology and disability justice! I especially enjoyed learning about the idea of "metaeugenics," a more subtle, underground form of eugenics that categorizes and catalogues disabled minds and bodies for conformative purposes. I'm glad I read this book, it's lit a fire under me to get back into reading more disability studies works again. If you're interested in disability or technology or both, you'll enjoy this book. Short but very substantial.

[John Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well thought out. Eugenics and AI show their similarity. Important to build Public Interest Technologies.

[Izabella Rodrigues · Rating 5 out of 5]

so important for me

all robots are disabled is so good
CHESS THE MUSICAL REFERENCE
midjourney slander

"A man went viral on Twitter for proclaiming that the word “delve” could be used to identify LLM- generated text and was met with mass ridicule from international English writers from Nigeria, India, and Singapore where the word is commonplace."