Reorienting Disability AI Imaginaries

Abstract This article looks at an important but as-yet underexplored aspect of artificial intelligence ( AI ) imaginaries in digital Asiascapes: disability. It performs a preliminary and exploratory analysis of disability in Asian AI imaginaries, revealing tensions and issues and raising questions for future research, policy consideration, and debate. It argues, first, that disability is an important component of AI imaginaries in Asia, in that AI imaginaries draw on Asian disability identities and representations but also shape them; and, second, that power – in ongoing struggles over the power relations of disability versus its slow social transformation – affects the ability of diverse interested actors to create and contest different imaginaries, something that might play out differently in Asian and inter-Asian contexts than elsewhere. In doing so, this article shines a spotlight on how the politics of disability meets the politics of AI in Asian imaginaries, with profound implications for social, cultural, and economic life.