Publication: The ‘Human Strategy’ and the Limits of Decision in Automated Administration

Announcing a new publication for the Future of Good Decisions Project: ‘The “Human Strategy” and the Limits of Decision in Automated Administration’. Read the publication here, as part of the Digibook Humanity in the Automated State, edited by Daria Morozova and Melanie Fink, published by the DigiCon Blog.

Authors Jake Goldenfein (Melbourne Law School) and Connal Parsley (Kent Law School) address the widespread reliance on the figure of the human as a strategy for regulating automated decision-making systems in government. They suggest that the calls to ‘humanize’ automated decision-making ‘prevent a more necessary and fundamental evaluation of whether the “decision” itself can be sustained as the legal, political, or technical site where values are operationalised’.

As the authors explain, along with the figure of the human comes a paradigm of decision-making that is itself being challenged by today’s complex distributed decision systems. These systems temporally and spatially disaggregate processes that were once unitary and located in a ‘final’ decision. They introduce steps that are more like ‘calculation’ than reasoning or decision-making, but might actually determine the nature of the outcome. Finally, they distribute decision agency through material and technological factors that strongly condition the exercise of decision-making authority.

Given these new material conditions, Goldenfein and Parsley question whether—even with a ‘human in the loop’—the legal category of decision is able to serve the function it has traditionally held as the site where individual rights and entitlements interface with the exercise of state power through administrative action. They argue that far from relying on human oversight of a process that no longer resembles ‘decision’ at a juridical level, the rise of decision-automation makes necessary a more fundamental examination of the way legal categories interface with the organisational conditions of the administrative state.

This publication is the first piece in a longer collaboration between the authors to rethink the nature and function of the legal category of decision in the contemporary administrative state. Sign up to the Future of Good Decisions mailing list for updates and future publications.