A one-day workshop at Kent Law School exploring the shifting conceptions of ‘decision’ at play in algorithmic decision-making and surrounding discourses; focusing on ontology, politics and ethics, in light of posthumanism and the algorithmic turn.

24 September 2024

University of Kent, Canterbury – Darwin College Boardroom

Speakers:

Anne Alombert
Louise Amoore
Alexander Campolo
Conor Heaney
Gerald Moore
Connal Parsley
Carolyn Pedwell
Tony D. Sampson

In-person only. All welcome!

Space and catering are limited – to RSVP or for more info, contact Dr Connal Parsley c.parsley@kent.ac.uk or Dr Conor Heaney c.heaney@kent.ac.uk  

An event of the Future of Good Decisions project funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, organised in conjunction with Kent Law School, the University of Kent Centre for Critical Thought, and Durham University

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Improved decision-making is primary among the advertised benefits of data-driven machine learning technologies, premised on their potential to offer greater speed, accuracy and efficiency. Yet Automated Decision-Making (ADM) is often difficult to reconcile with political, legal and ethical expectations, in a variety of contexts and at substantive and procedural levels. In other ways, it might generate new expectations that are not well understood.

This workshop aims to renew attention to the image of ‘decision’ underlying the move to automate decision-making processes. How should we theorise ‘decision’ in the variety of contexts, disciplines, discourses and institutions where automation is widely adopted? What counts as part of a decision process, and what are these processes “made of”? What are the political and legal stakes of those conceptions, and what are the effects on how we understand responsibility and ethical value in decision-making?

The discussion takes two central parameters. First, the broad transition from the liberal individual human, understood as an autonomous agent and unit of political value, to the posthuman subject. In N Katherine Hayles’ formulation (in How We Became Posthuman), ‘appears when computation rather than possessive individualism is taken as the ground of being, a move that allows the posthuman to be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.’ Decision- making techniques and regulatory mechanisms relying on this configuration have emerged (like “human in the loop”). Yet the nature and location of decision itself remains in tension, subtending a human-technology opposition. Second, in this context the issue of how to conceptualise, locate and ground decision, judgment, and value, requires further reflection. As Louise Amoore points out in Cloud Ethics, new machine- learning-driven human-machine surgical practices invoke ‘different relations of judgment and decision’ than those embedded in regulatory and ethical paradigms—and which are yet to be reckoned with.

Amidst a wealth of contemporary retheorisations of the human in relation to technology, the notion of decision remains under-explored. Conversely, major attempts to address decision by theorising past the liberal human agent have offered only limited resources for thinking the politics and ethics of ADM. First-order cybernetics—the ‘science of decision-making’ in Helmut Nechansky’scoinage—ontologically collapsed human, machine and animal into information processing and feedback mechanisms (whether organic, inorganic, or organisational). Yet its conception of decision value relies on goal-directed, teleologic behaviour programmed externally. Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, building on second-order cybernetics, theorises decision as a contingent paradox; concretely, as an effect of what is undecidable, and determined only through observation and communication.

These traditions invite further reflection on how we might receive Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of both the subject and decision in the era of algorithmic technosocial ecologies. Not only is a ‘theory of the subject … incapable of accounting for the slightest decision’ (in The Politics of Friendship), but in ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility’,  decisions cannot be based on knowledge: ‘[e]thics and politics […] start with undecidability’. Decision after the Algorithmic Turn: Politics, Ethics, Ontology will explore the conceptions of decision at play in and around algorithmic decision-making.

• What is demanded of an adequate theory of decisions in our contemporary technosocial context?
• Is “decision” itself a form of political technology?
• Is a theory of decision possible that can remain sensitive across ontological registers (biological, individual, organisational, etc.)?
• Are the ethical and political aspects of decisions heterogeneous to knowledge?
• Is the value of decision-making necessarily attached to contingent goals of a ‘system’; the ‘survival’ of the organism, or the ‘profit’ of a business organisation?
• How can social systems articulate new kinds of ‘good’ around which to orient decision-making processes, in light of emerging ecological philosophies?