7 SYSTEMS JUSTICE, AI, AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION

• Published in: Against Reduction
• Main Authors: Arista, Noelani, Costanza-Chock, Sasha, Ghazavi, Vafa, Kite, Suzanne, Klusmeier, Cathryn, Lewis, Jason Edward, Pechawis, Archer, Sawyer, Jaclyn, Zhang, Gary Zhexi, Zhang, Snoweria
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: MIT Press 2021

We live in a deeply unjust world. Across borders, life chances are hugely affected by where we are born. The median age for someone in Uganda or Niger is below sixteen years while in Germany or Japan it is around forty-six. 1 One in four children suffer stunted growth, rising to one in three in developing countries. 2 Around four billion people lack any access to the internet. 3 Within countries, social, gender, and racial disadvantages limit, often sharply, prospects for a flourishing life. Frequently such disadvantages are deeply intertwined with pervasive patterns of social and economic life. As recent research by Raj Chetty and his collaborators has shown, for instance, black boys from wealthy families in America are more likely to become poor in adulthood compared to their similarly wealthy white peers. Even when they grow up in the same neighborhood with parents at the same income level, black boys end up with lower incomes than white boys in 99 percent of the country. 4 Arbitrary limitations on "development as freedom," in Amartya Sen's famous formulation, abound. 5 And beyond inequality and oppression, though not disconnected from it, lies humanity's reckoning with climate change and what some have described as the Anthropocene. The latter concept captures the profound intensification of human impact on the environment in our age, which, according to Jedediah Purdy, “finds its most radical expression in our acknowledgment that the familiar divide between people and the natural world is no longer useful or accurate.” 6