AI and disabled people’s independent living: a framework for analysis

Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly reshapes social participation, yet its implications for disabled people’s opportunities to live independently and be included in the community—as stipulated in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities—remain underexplored. This article addresses the gap by integrating sociotechnical analysis with key concepts from disability studies, including the social model of disability and the independent living (IL) epistemology. Such an approach helps develop a novel analytical framework at the intersection of AI and disability studies, offering a structured way to evaluate AI’s role in enabling or restricting IL. The framework is applied by mapping AI-mediated barriers and enablers of IL, identified through a review of recent literature. The analysis reveals how AI can reinforce exclusion, but also enable disabled people’s self-determination and social participation when aligned with disability rights principles. The article concludes with recommendations for enhancing AI-mediated enablers and minimising corresponding barriers to IL. Key alignment insights suggest that the exponential development of AI-powered technologies could serve to boost the mainstreaming of techno-assistance, affirm human-machine hybridity, and illuminate interdependence, thus enhancing disabled people’s IL—but only as far as AI-mediated overvaluation of self-sufficiency, algorithmic injustice, and techno-fetishism are adequately addressed. Future research should therefore explore co-design with disabled people and communities, as well as governance models that balance AI innovation with social justice considerations.