Keynote Address - Building Anti-Ableist AI? Crip Theory Meets Automation

AI systems are trained on a fantasy of the “normal” user — someone who moves through the world without friction, whose body and mind require no accommodation, whose output is never interrupted. This keynote asks what changes when AI is built from a different starting premise: one where interdependence, adaptation, and non-normative embodiment are the default, not the exception requiring a retrofit.

Drawing on disability studies and crip theory — including Eva Kittay’s work on dependency and care, and Alison Kafer’s political/relational model of disability — Aubrey Blanche argues that the automation industry’s obsession with “efficiency” and “frictionlessness” is, functionally, a machine for scaling ableism. Fixing this takes more than accessibility features bolted onto ableist architecture.

This talk maps where current AI development forecloses disabled autonomy, where it could genuinely expand it, and what changes when disabled people set the terms of that design rather than requesting access to someone else’s.