Artificial Intelligence and the Marginalization of the Poor

Artificial Intelligence aims at recreating human intelligence through a computer program. AI programmers tend to see intelligence as what they have, so it reflects the vision of wealthy, able-bodied, white men. This paper examines the experience of poverty in the first world as a challenge to AI research. The poor tend to have their interests dominated and denigrated by the upper classes, make choices good and ill out of desperation for survival, and experience a fractured consciousness of their class status as a result of their situation and exploitation. These epistemic realities are foreign to an AI whose aim is optimal choice selection. As a result, the more common place AI algorithms become for making decisions, the more marginalized we should expect the epistemologies of the poor, and consequently the poor themselves, to be. A Catholic ethic based in the “option for the poor” must prioritize the epistemology of the poor over current AI work and resist definitions of intelligence that fail to account for “the least of these.”