Not a day goes by without a new story on the perils of technology. We hear of increasingly clever machines that surpass human capability and comprehension, of tech billionaires imploring each other to stop the ‘out-of-control race’ to produce the most powerful artificial intelligence which poses ‘profound risks to society’, we hear of genetic technologies capable of altering the human genome in ways we cannot predict and a future two-tier humanity consisting of those of us who are genetically enhanced and those who are not. How can we respond to these stories? What should we do politically? By way of exploring these questions (using the UK as the primary example of context), I want to move beyond the usual arguments and legal devices that serve to identify tech developers, and users, as being at fault for individual acts of wrongdoing, recklessness, incompetence or negligence, and ask instead how we might address the broader structural dynamics intertwined with the increasing use of AI and Repro-tech. My argument will be that to take a much sharper structural perspective on these transformative technologies is a vital requirement of contemporary politics.

Here I bring together the arguments from the previous chapters of the book. My reading of Young’s work on structural injustice leads us to an uncomfortable political realisation. The usual tools deployed for addressing social harms and injustices – the tracing of liability in contextual moral or legal terms – are not useful for structural injustice, which is much more complex and amorphous in shape, not least in the context of AI and Repro-tech. Even though no simple political solution is apparent, I argue that one essential approach is to focus specifically on the question of whose interests are at play in the governance of transformative technologies as they operate in the background conditions of structural injustice. Thinking back to the arguments made in Chapter 3 about the functioning of regulators, I argue that the macro-level coordinating powers of a state can be redeployed to address background conditions of structural injustice through the direct reweighting of private and public interest within the mechanisms of governance itself. This is an alternative to current attempts in the context of tech governance to deploy a politics grounded in tracing fault or leaving structural patterns outside of political focus altogether. I advocate for a radical reshaping of large-scale regulatory public body landscapes in which a new form of lay-centric governance can be incorporated to deliver the sorts of decisions that a state defined by its current relationship with tech industries cannot.

Humanity’s increasing reliance on AI and robotics is driven by compelling narratives of efficiency in which the human is a poor substitute for the extraordinary computational power of machine learning, the creative competences of generative AI as well as the speed, accuracy and consistency of automation in so many spheres of human activity. Indeed, AI is increasingly becoming the core technological foundation of many contemporary societies. Most thinking on how to manage the downside risks to humanity of this seismic societal shift is set out in a direct fault-based relationship such as the innovative EU AI Act which is by far the most comprehensive political attempt to locate (or deter) those directly responsible for AI-generated harm. I argue that while such approaches are vital for combating injustice exacerbated by AI and robotics, too little thought goes into political approaches to the structural dynamics of AI’s impact on society. By way of example, I examine the UK ‘pro-innovation’ approach to AI governance and explore how it fails to address the structural injustices inherent in increasing AI usage.

In order to set the ground for my arguments later in this book on the structural dynamics of AI and Repro-tech, I begin with Iris Marion Young’s political theory, not because she worked on the governance of technology but because her work on structural injustice enables the exploration of the limits of a politics grounded in liability, which is where most of the thinking on tech governance currently resides. I take time in Chapter 1 to consider the ways in which, influenced by her critical engagement with the work of Hannah Arendt, Young leads us to the question of ‘where nobody is liable, who is responsible?’ This structural question acts as a central theme of the book in the specific context of technology governance beyond liability and I use it to develop my own particular interpretation of structural injustice, in part based on my critical exploration of the work of Young’s critics. My interpretation of Young’s work is unusual in that I see substantial political merit in actively sharpening the distinction between liability and structural injustice. This approach goes against the grain of current thinking on structural injustice.

What will our reproductive habits look like in the future, and why does it matter? Part of the answer to this question is the use of in vitro pre-implantation genetic technologies (PGTs). Originally designed to screen for a range of genetic conditions such as sickle cell disease or Huntington’s disease, new markets are set to emerge where prospective parents will be promised the opportunity to select the personality characteristics of their unborn children: this is what the political theorist Robert Nozick (1974) thought would result in a ‘genetic supermarket’. Unlike the case of AI, there has been a long-standing tradition of regulating Repro-tech. The UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryonic Association (HFEA) is a regulatory public body created in 1990 in light of a report authored by the philosopher Mary Warnock. It is widely regarded internationally as the gold standard of regulators and the first to govern technologies as complex as gene-editing and cloning. However, though we might see some elements of promise in Warnock’s approach for a wider model of technology governance, I consider what I see as the general demise of regulatory landscapes in line with the dominant US-based ‘state capture’ school of thought.

In my concluding remarks I argue that what I have constructed in this book goes some way to thinking more clearly about how we might politically address the relationship between transformative technologies, AI and Repro-tech, and structural injustice.

Why is gender so important for interpreting the world in which we live? In this volume, sixteen world-famous scholars address this question from their respective fields: political theory, philosophy, medical anthropology, sociology, law, geography, Islamic studies, cultural studies, philosophy of science, literature, psychoanalysis, history of art, education and economics. Inevitably, questions of race and sexuality run through the volume as authors grapple with the consequences of gendered social orderings. The chapters cover an extraordinary array of contexts, ranging from rethinking trans* bodies, to traumatized tribal communities, to sexualized violence, to assisted reproductive technologies, through to epigenetics, post-humanism and post-anthropocentrism, and yet they are all connected by their focus on the importance of gender as a category of analysis.