Critical Research and Institutional Redesign: For an Ecological Approach to Human-AI Government Decision-Making

“Earth seen from Space,” by DLR: German Aerospace Center, 23 July 2012. Image: wikimedia.

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Tuesday 15 April, 3pm-5pm
4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus

Dr Connal Parsley (Kent Law School, UK) in conversation with Professor Hélène Frichot (Melbourne School of Design), Dr Jake Goldenfein (Melbourne Law School), Professor Chris Speed (School of Design, RMIT)

In this symposium, Dr Connal Parsley (Kent Law School, UK) will present the Future of Good Decisions project: a multi-disciplinary, collaborative UKRI-funded project that responds critically to the rise of data-driven algorithmic technologies in Western liberal states. Accounts of this emerging institutional transformation have underlined the way it disrupts the processes and norms of the public sphere, and the principles of the rule of law. Predominant responses, correspondingly, have sought to defend and reassert these values as well as their deeper political-ontological premises – for example via the ‘human in the loop’ regulatory strategy, which poses the figure of the human as a repository of ethical and lawful deliberation, separate from technology and capable of governing it. Instead of engineering algorithmic systems to better conform to existing evaluative frameworks – which emerged in a different milieu to govern a different kind of decision – The Future of Good Decisions asks: what are decisions, today? Through what new value concepts, design principles and evaluative practices can we make demands on administrative decision-making to participate in the democratic reimagination of deliberative governance?

The session will outline the project’s strategy for prioritising contemporary philosophies of evolving technosocial ecologies, and especially the work of Bernard Stiegler, as resources for practical and normative institutional reinvention. The project brings this strand of thought into contact with contemporary legal theory that decenters human agency; public law; and current approaches to government decision-making, systems, and regulation. The project adopts prefigurative research methods, using Live Action Role Play to explore the participatory co-design of government decision systems, in order to both destabilise settled liberal legal understandings of humans, technology, and decision-making, and augur new ways to design and evaluate decision systems.

The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion addressing the project’s research approach. The panellists will draw on their adjacent research practices to address the rise of ‘design’ as a critical and political research modality, the importance of fiction and speculation in critical research (especially on both algorithmic techniques and legal systems), the use of critical philosophies for normative goals, challenges in ‘grasping’ AI as a research object and an object of regulation, and the ongoing ecological turn.

Speaker bios:

Connal Parsley is Reader in Law (Associate Professor) and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at Kent Law School, UK. His research brings together critical approaches to law and jurisprudence, political theory, cultural studies, and creative practice and methods. Connal is co-founder of the AHRC ‘Law and the Human’ research network. He currently leads the UKRI-funded multi-sector collaborative research project, ‘The Future of Good Decisions: An Evolutionary Approach to Human-AI Administrative Decision-Making’. The project combines public law, philosophies of evolving technosocial ecologies, critical human-AI algorithmic decision system design and evaluation, and participatory prefigurative research methods. Connal has published widely on topics at the intersection of law and legal traditions, political theory and visual culture, and on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. He is the English translator of several works of contemporary Italian thought, including Roberto Esposito’s Categories of the Impolitical (Fordham, 2015).

Architectural theorist and philosopher, writer and critic, Hélène Frichot is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia. Previously, she was Professor of Critical Studies and Gender Theory, and Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Sweden. Her recent publications include Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (Bloomsbury 2018) and Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (AADR 2019). She has collaborated on editing many anthologies including: Infrastructural Love: Caring for Our Architectural Support Systems (Birkhauser 2022); Architectural Affects After Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge 2021); Ficto-Critical Approaches (Bloomsbury 2020), and a special issue of the Journal of Architecture, Jennifer Bloomer: A Revisitation (2023).

Jake Goldenfein is a law and technology scholar at Melbourne Law School and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Jake published a monograph, ‘Monitoring Laws', in 2019 with Cambridge University Press and an edited collection, ‘Economies of Virtue: The circulation of ethics in AI’, in 2022 with the Institute for Network Cultures. His current work explores the ways law constructs the data economy, the commodification of data and datasets, and tools for governing AI and automated decision-making.

Chris Speed FRSE is Professor of Design for Regenerative Futures at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia, where he collaborates with a wide variety of communities and partners to explore how design provides methods to adapt toward becoming a regenerative society. Chris has an established track record in directing large complex grants and educational programmes with academic, industry and third sector partners, that apply design and data methods to social, environmental and economic challenge.