This dissertation attends to the experiences of those suffering on the systemic underbelly of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Unlike many theological engagements with AI, I begin with the harmful material and social effects of AI to show the extensive global reach of algorithmic power. AI is a sociotechnical system that extracts resources, labor, and data from communities around the world. The experiences of those on the ‘periphery’ of existing academic debates about AI – including surveilled Amazon package delivery drivers, migrants unable to obtain asylum appointments at the U.S. border, and rural farming communities drained by water-hungry server farms – demonstrate that advanced science and technology should be ‘peripheral’ to human flourishing and prudentially ordered toward the common good, rather than individual benefit, corporate profit, or technocratic control.
This dissertation expands the parameters of the critical moral analysis of algorithmic power within the Church and within the field of Christian ethics by evaluating AI in light of the preferential option for the poor, and by considering possible futures for technological development from existentially peripheral perspectives. Specifically, I amplify the experiences of those most harmed by algorithmic power yet most excluded from existing ethical discourse in order to argue for a “technoperipheral” framework for the moral analysis of emerging technologies. This approach challenges and reframes existing approaches in technology ethics and theological ethics (1) by attending to diverse forms of subjective embodied knowledge not typically considered central to either Catholic or industry-specific approaches to AI ethics; and (2) by offering concrete ethical norms to redirect the future of technological innovation, helping the Church take action to ameliorate the suffering of those most subject to the wounds inflicted by algorithmic power.