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.

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.