Event organisers: Dr Connal Parsley, Professor Gerald Moore, Dr Conor Heaney
Event partner: University of Durham
A one-day workshop at the University of Kent 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.
This workshop 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), ‘the 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’s coinage—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?
Presenters:
Anne Alombert, Université Paris 8 https://philosophie.univ-paris8.fr/anne-alombert
Louise Amoore, Durham University https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/louise-amoore/v
Alexander Campolo, Durham University https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/alexander-campolo/
Conor Heaney, University of Kent https://www.kent.ac.uk/graduate-researcher-college/people/4857/heaney-conor
Gerald Moore, Durham University https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/gerald-moore/
Connal Parsley, University of Kent https://www.kent.ac.uk/kent-law-school/people/1334/parsley-connal
Carolyn Pedwell, Lancaster University https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/people/carolyn-pedwell
Tony D. Sampson, University of Essex https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/SAMPS41407/Tony-Sampson