Reviewed by A.C. Riffer
Bridging science and technology studies with a critical disability perspective, Rua M. Williams’ Disabling Intelligences is a sharp, accessible, and deeply necessary intervention into conversations about artificial intelligence, disability, and power. Williams offers a framework for understanding how contemporary AI systems are not neutral innovations, but are instead shaped by, and often reproduce, the logics of eugenics.
One of the book’s most striking strengths is its clarity. Williams is both precise and widely accessible. Rather than obscuring their argument behind technical jargon, they invite readers into it, offering tools to classify, evaluate, and critique AI systems. This accessibility does not come at the expense of rigor; instead, it expands the reach of the book’s insights, making it relevant across disciplines and levels of expertise.
Compassion and humor are also woven throughout, making the book not just accessible, but welcoming. At one point, Williams describes a colleague’s casual dismissal of ethics as a kind of “villain origin story,” a moment that is both sharply humorous and quietly alarming. It captures the broader dynamic the book traces: how ethical concerns are often sidelined in the pursuit of innovation, with real consequences for those most impacted.
This attentiveness is especially evident in Williams’ reflections on teaching. In one instance, they encourage a student to trust their own voice rather than rely on AI-generated writing, framing the student’s work as already sufficient. The result, that the student continues using AI but becomes less open about it, quietly reveals the limits of addressing these issues at the individual level. Rather than assigning blame, Willaims’ response highlights the broader pressures that shape such decisions, particularly the pervasive sense of not being “enough” without technological assistance.
Rather than treating contemporary AI as a sudden or unprecedented development, Williams situates AI within eugenic myths surrounding intelligence and hierarchy. In doing so, Williams reveals how current technologies often reproduce older models of exclusion, particularly in the ways they categorize, evaluate, and act upon human difference. These patterns are not incidental, but reflect the underlying assumptions built into many systems now taken for granted.
Reading the book can feel, at times, like a confrontation with the present. The examples Williams offers make clear that these dynamics are not speculative or distant but already embedded in systems that structure everyday life, from surveillance to hiring to healthcare. There is a weight to this recognition, a sense of “this is where we are,” that lingers throughout the text. And yet, this bleakness is not undermining. Instead, it sharpens the urgency of the book’s intervention.
Importantly, Disabling Intelligences does more than diagnose the problem. By centering disabled experiences and ways of knowing, Williams offers readers a conceptual toolkit for resisting what they identify as “metaeugenics” in contemporary technology. This shift, from passive consumption to critical engagement, repositions readers not just as users of technology, but as participants capable of questioning and reshaping it.
This is a book that feels as though it should be widely taught, read, and discussed–not because it simplifies its subject matter, but because it makes its stakes unmistakably clear. Disabling Intelligences equips readers with both the language and the perspective needed to understand the systems they are already living within, and to begin imagining alternatives.
Title: Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI
Author: Rua M. Williams
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
Date: 2025
Read A. C. Riffer’s reviews of Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming; In Sickness and in Health: Love Stories from the Front Lines of America’s Caregiving Crisis; Respecting Disability: Attitudes, Ideals, and Relationships, and It Wasn’t Meant to Be Perfect: A Memoir in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Reviewer
A. C. Riffer is a hopeless romantic and enigmatically so. In their spare time, they somehow managed to earn a doctorate in Social Work from the University of Illinois Chicago, where their research explored censorship and culture.