Dear ICA colleagues,
I am pleased to share that our new book, The Inequality Regime of AI: Power, Allocation, and the Struggle for Justice, co-authored with Maria Laura Ruiu, is now out with Routledge.
The book asks how artificial intelligence is reorganising inequality. Rather than treating AI only as a technological innovation, a question of bias, or a matter of access, we examine it as an emerging inequality regime: a social, political, and infrastructural system through which people are classified, ranked, predicted, included, excluded, and governed.
Our central argument is that digital inequality is shifting from questions of access and participation to questions of prediction and allocation. The key issue is no longer only who can use digital technologies, but who owns and controls the data, models, infrastructures, and categories through which social life is made legible and actionable.
The book asks: Who has the power to classify? Who becomes visible to AI systems, and under what terms? Who is misread, excluded, or rendered risky? Who benefits from automation, and who performs its hidden labour? Who bears the environmental costs of so-called intelligent systems? And who gets to define what intelligence should be for?
Across the chapters, we develop concepts such as the allocative turn, the AI stratification spiral, algorithmic habitus, digital feudalism, and redistributive infrastructures to examine AI across everyday life, institutions, labour, welfare, education, environmental systems, data economies, and global power relations.
The book is critical, but not fatalistic. It argues that AI justice requires moving beyond narrow debates on ethics, efficiency, and transparency towards broader questions of redistribution, recognition, representation, and democratic control.
With best wishes,
Massimo Ragnedda
Professor of Media
University of Sharjah (UAE)
------------------------------
Massimo Ragnedda
University of Sharjah, U.A.E.
Sharjah
United Arab Emirates
------------------------------