We are entering the “Age of Augmentation”: a period in which AI and other emerging technologies increasingly mediate how people communicate, work, create and interact with the world. The central question is no longer simply what technology can do, but what happens to human agency when technology becomes part of our everyday lives?
For many disabled people, this future has already arrived. AI-enabled speech recognition, predictive text, eye-gaze systems, powered mobility and other assistive technologies can radically expand communication, independence and creative possibility.
Technology has always been key to my independence, but my analysis of recent advances in generative AI has led me to a more nuanced question: does more technology always mean more agency?
There are situations when technology removes a barrier, and others when inserting technology between people can diminish something important. A communication aid may make my speech more intelligible while losing spontaneity. AI may enable independent creative work while raising questions about authorship and control. Human assistance may appear to reduce my independence while sometimes enabling richer forms of interaction.
DECIDE TO RESIST begins with these contradictions in my own life and expands outwards to meet disabled people whose relationships with their bodies, technology and independence are very different from mine, alongside scientists, engineers, artists and technologists developing technologies at the frontier of human augmentation.
The project looks to the future of assistive technology, asking what happens when technology moves beyond compensating for disability and begins to expand what a human being can do. Moreover, access to assistive technology is not equally available, and the people who depend upon it often have limited influence over how it is designed, provided or governed. The project therefore asks not only what technology can enable, but who gets access to that capability and who gets to shape it.
This makes immersive storytelling particularly relevant. Through 360-degree filmmaking, VR and experimentation with interactive forms, DECIDE TO RESIST aims to bring audiences into my physical and technological world rather than leaving them to observe it from outside. My ambition is not to claim that VR can reproduce the experience of disability, but to experiment with perspective, embodiment and communication in ways unavailable to conventional documentary making.