Full Description
Does artificial intelligence empower humanity, or does it merely automate the stratifications of the past? In The Inequality Regime of AI, the authors offer a critical sociology of artificial power, arguing that AI represents a fundamental ontological shift in how social life is organized, valued, and governed.
Moving beyond the traditional digital divide, this book introduces the concept of the Inequality Regime of AI. The authors trace a profound transition from inequalities of participation to inequalities of prediction, where social power is concentrated in the hands of those who own and control the means of cognition. Through a global lens, the volume exposes the hidden architectures of the algorithmic age: from the predictive cage of automated governance and the digital feudalism of rentier platforms to the extractive computational metabolism that binds AI to planetary resource depletion. Drawing on Southern epistemologies and the concept of techno-colonialism, the book reveals how AI stabilizes social hierarchies while presenting them as objective, efficient, and inevitable. However, the authors do not stop at critique. They advocate for a "praxis of freedom", proposing a shift from extractive models toward redistributive infrastructures and the algorithmic commons.
Grounded in a relational ethics of care and critical literacy, this volume is essential reading for scholars and students of sociology, media studies, political science, and the ethics of technology seeking to understand, and contest, the new architectures of global power.
Contents
Introduction. The Social Question of Artificial Intelligence: Framing Justice, Power, and Collective Intelligence in the Age of AI Part 1. From Digital Divides to Inequality Regimes 1. AI as an Inequality Regime; 2. The Roots of AI Inequality: From Digital Divides to the Allocative Turn; 3. The Core Fractures: Data, Algorithm, Governance Part 2. Architectures of Allocation 4. The Algorithmic Habitus: Micro-politics of the Self; 5. Institutionalising Inequality: Labour, Welfare and Education; 6. Bias as Structural, Symbolic, and Algorithmic Violence Part 3. Global Orders of Extraction 7. AI and Environmental Inequalities: From Digital to Ecological Regimes; 8. Techno-Colonialism: Data, Labour, and Epistemic Extractivism; 9. Digital Feudalism and the Algorithmic Commons Part 4. Horizons of Justice 10. Literacies of Liberation; 11. From Inequality Regime to Redistributive Infrastructures
