CONCEPT
Vulnerability Analysis (Technologies of Humility)
The systematic inquiry into who is most exposed to a technology's harms — and how they differ from the populations its designers imagined.
Vulnerability analysis is the second of Jasanoff's four technologies of humility. It asks: Who is most exposed to consequences, and how do they differ from the populations the technology's designers had in mind? The question recognizes that technologies are designed, tested, and refined for specific user populations — and that when they reach populations with different resources, different infrastructures, different vulnerabilities, the consequences diverge from what designers predicted. AI tools are designed predominantly by English-speaking knowledge workers in wealthy countries. Vulnerability analysis asks what happens when the tools reach populations that do not share that demographic, economic, and educational profile: the developer in Lagos whose access depends on infrastructure she does not control, the displaced expert whose identity is organized around expertise AI has commoditized, the child whose developmental needs were not considered in the tool's design. Vulnerability is not uniform, and governance that treats it as uniform will protect the wrong people and ignore the right ones.
