Shaping AI
Description
This volume challenges the dominant narrative of artificial intelligence as a neutral, inevitable force, showing instead how AI is a political project shaped by power, labor, and history. Bridging technical, philosophical, and sociological perspectives, it examines how AI systems-from healthcare algorithms to generative models-reorganize inequality, redistribute risk, and reshape human agency across global contexts.
Contributors trace AI's lived consequences through lenses including health equity, disability justice, and technocolonialism, alongside sustained inquiry into knowledge, embodiment, and responsibility. The book critiques the "technological fix," arguing that treating social problems as engineering puzzles can deepen structural injustice-especially when governance frameworks prioritize efficiency over equity and procedural compliance over justice.
Moving beyond critique to praxis, this collection invites readers to reclaim agency in the algorithmic age. It offers critical orientations for building AI grounded in care, democratic contestation, and collective responsibility-so that technology serves human flourishing rather than extraction and control.
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Persons
Dr. Christo El Morr, PhD, is Professor of Health Informatics and Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at York University, Toronto. His Equity Informatics research spans equity AI, patient-centered virtual care, mental health, global health promotion, and disability rights monitoring. He is also a theologian, poet and a novelist.
Dr. Anoop George, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad. His research expertise lies in continental philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, and philosophy of technology, with a particular focus on Heideggerian perspectives on the human condition.
Dr. Vijay Mago , PhD is an Associate Professor at York University, Toronto whose work sits at the intersection of computer science, medical informatics, and health informatics. He develops AI- and large-scale natural language model-driven solutions that translate complex data into actionable intelligence, driving measurable impact across clinical care, health system decision-making, and population-level public health surveillance.
Content
Part I: Critical Frontiers of AI: Inequality, Health, and Dis/ability.- Chapter 1. Beyond the Myth of Neutral Machines.- Chapter 2. From Structured Data to Text Understanding: Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing for Healthcare Intelligence.- Chapter 3. Measuring and Mitigating Bias and Discrimination in AI.- Chapter 4. The Gender Data Gap in Medical AI: Causes, Consequences, and Building Inclusive Solutions.- Chapter 5. Advances in Machine Learning for Stochastic Transport: A Perspective of Cellular Biology and Urban Transit Systems.- Chapter 6. Data, Dignity, and Dehumanization: A Critical Examination of AI's Impact on Disability and Human Experience.- Chapter 7. Artificial Intelligence and Technocolonialism: Western Ethics, Morality, and the Absolving of Imperial Violence.- Chapter 8. 'Humans in the Loop': Insights from Algorithmic Management on Digital Labour Platforms in India.- Chapter 9. Algorithmic Exploitation: A Historical Materialist Critique of AI in the Platform Economy and Health Systems Affecting Racialized Immigrants in Canada.- Part II: Philosophy, Embodiment, and the Ontologies of AI .- Chapter 10. Truth and Post-Truth in the Age of AI: Heidegger among the Chat Bots.- Chapter 11. AI Through a Philosophical Lens.- Chapter 12. Heidegger and Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Perspective.- Chapter 13. Why Write: Producing the Author in the Time of AI.- Chapter 14. Liminal Responsibility: Toward an Ethic of Human-AI Relation.- Part III: Ethics, Governance, and AI's Social Impact .- Chapter 15. If You're Not on the Table, You're on the Menu: Generative AI, Cultural Appropriation, and the Ethics of Data Use.- Chapter 16. Imagined Stabilities: India's AI Policies, Techno-Human Relationships, and Postphenomenological Futures.- Chapter 17. Promise and Perils of AI: Social and Economic.- Chapter 18. Moral Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Reflections on Its Possibility and Implications.- Chapter 19. Contours of Social Agency in Technology Development: Ethics Committees in Governance of AI.- Chapter 20. Examining AI Market Failure and the Development of Use Cases: An Indian Perspective.- Chapter 21. AI Through Critical Lenses: Decolonizing Technology and Advancing Feminist Futures.- Chapter 22. Shaping AI Otherwise: From Critique to Collective Futures.