Dehumanising Borders: Can Artificial Intelligence Mitigate Relational Inequality in Border Controls?

Abstract

Recent relational egalitarian objections to restrictive borders have illuminated the intrinsic moral harms perpetrated by these systems. Moreover, suitable mitigation strategies for redressing these harms encounter considerable feasibility concerns due to the resources that would be required. This paper considers whether emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies might simultaneously diminish the burden of such reforms while meeting the demands of relational equality. A two-pronged objection to their use on relational egalitarian terms is presented. First, the inherent limitations of such systems to understand the moral context of the interaction together with the kinds of biases that are built into current and foreseeable systems fatally undermine their ability to mitigate the relational egalitarian concerns. Rather, the risk reintroduces them in revised forms. Second, the very nature of AI undermines its ability to preserve relational equality in border assessments (even when assuming ideal functioning of the system) because of the kinds of relationships such a system would either introduce or displace.