Welcome back to Mixtape, the TechCrunch podcast that looks at the human element that powers technology.
For this episode we spoke with Meredith Whittaker, co-founder of the AI Now Institute and Minderoo Research Professor at NYU; Mara Mills, associate professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU and co-director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies; and Sara Hendren, professor at Olin College of Engineering and author of the recently published What Can a Body Do: How We Meet the Built World.
It was a wide-ranging discussion about artificial intelligence and disability. Hendren kicked us off by exploring the distinction between the medical and social models of disability:
So in a medical model of disability, as articulated in disability studies, the idea is just that disability is a kind of condition or an impairment or something that’s going on with your body that takes it out of the normative average state of the body says something in your sensory makeup or…