“Your Data is My Body”: Prediction and Reproduction in an AI System

• In Event: Constellation Thinking and AI Ethics

Abstract

For the past two years, a provincial government in Northern Argentina has deployed an algorithmic platform to predict teenage pregnancy among “at risk” girls and young women. Developed in partnership with a major technology company in the United States, the project collects and coordinates data from 200,000 people living in “vulnerable areas.” Although the project was launched in 2017, it came to public attention in April 2018, the same week that the national government of Argentina began intense debates about legalizing abortion.

This paper considers the media coverage and public discourse sparked by this project, and how they are embroiled in society-wide debates about reproduction, sexuality, social control, surveillance, and human rights. Is artificial intelligence inevitably a “patriarchal artefact” as some feminist commentators responding to the project claim? Or can it be, as proponents of the project suggest, a tool to solve obdurate social problems in low-resource areas? How do predictive analytics form new forms of social control, entrench existing social structures, and/or operate as sites of contestation?

Author

• Alexa Hagerty, Stanford (alum)