AI Technologies Likely to Entrench Exploitation of Service Users

A new analysis links advanced monitoring tools to historic patterns of institutional control over mental health service users.

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In a moment when artificial intelligence is experiencing a surge in popularity, concerns are being raised that the implementation of AI and other digital technologies in the mental health field could exacerbate existing power imbalances between professional institutions and service users.

Critical disability scholar and law professor Piers Gooding, in a new chapter from the Handbook of Disability: Critical Thought and Social Change in a Globalizing World, warns that the desire to implement AI in disability services and mental health comes fraught with ethical tensions, particularly when businesses prioritize profit and governments seek more invasive forms of control. While market and state forces look to exploit these new digital tools, Gooding argues that service users and disabled people risk being further exploited.

Gooding writes:

“The use of technologies like AI to make assumptions and judgments about who we are and who we will become poses greater risks than just an invasion of privacy; it poses an existential threat to human autonomy and the ability to explore, develop, and express our identities. It has clear potential to normalize surveillance in a way that is reminiscent of nineteenth-century asylums as a state-authorized (and often privately run) site of control but using twenty-first-century techniques of ubiquitous observation and monitoring.”

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Micah Ingle, PhD
Micah is part-time faculty in psychology at Point Park University. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology: Consciousness and Society from the University of West Georgia. His interests include humanistic, critical, and liberation psychologies. He has published work on empathy, individualism, group therapy, and critical masculinities. Micah has served on the executive boards of Division 32 of the American Psychological Association (Society for Humanistic Psychology) as well as Division 24 (Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology). His current research focuses on critiques of the western individualizing medical model, as well as cultivating alternatives via humanities-oriented group and community work.

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