ADM Network Meeting: Re-humanizing automated decision-making

This online workshop marks the formal launch of the ADM network and is dedicated to exploring what re-humanizing automated decision-making might mean, as facilitated through presentations of ADM cases and empirical work in progress. 

Re-humanising automated decision-making | ADM Nordic report -  November 2020 (pdf)

As the uses of automated decision-making (ADM) are increasing in private companies, governments and public authorities, automation processes are spreading from manufacturing products and services to making important decisions about people’s lives. This workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and experts to meet the shared challenge of re-humanizing ADM. We define ADM as procedures in which decisions are delegated to a public or corporate entity, which then uses automatically executed human-made decision-making models. Whereas earlier research often explores problems arising from ADM systems, their connections to inequalities, lack of transparency and opaque understanding of people and their lives, our workshop develops complementary perspectives by focusing on ADM as it relates to infrastructures of everyday lives and shapes our imaginaries of the world we want to live in. 

With the move towards re-humanizing ADM we seek to make visible human forces and ideals that the dominant logics, defined by techno-optimism and political-economic aims of efficiency and optimization, efficiently conceal. Re-humanizing is a starting point for exploring the complexities of ADM by re-establishing the human as a critical and creative agent in human-machine relationships that are emerging in the wake of recent ADM technologies and related discourses. We deliberately focus on ADM rather than artificial intelligence (AI), which is currently the hyped term, because the term AI invokes connotations of machinic intelligence that operate without human involvement. Even if the papers discussed in the workshop might bring us to the realm of AI, we remain cautious of ascribing human-like autonomy and intentionality to machine-based procedures. Instead, we maintain our focus on how humans are participants in the design of automated services, as objects of data collection and processing, in making sense of data and making decisions about data, and in implementing decisions. Here we emphasize the importance of not merely highlighting human involvement in technological processes, but exploring how humans are involved and thereby implicated in such processes.

The meeting was hosted by Tuukka Lehtiniemi & Minna Ruckenstein (University of Helsinki)

Case presentations

  • Naja Holten-Møller: Giving legitimacy to design | University of Copenhagen
  • Sonal Makhija: Seeking efficiency: Migri’s chatbots | University of Helsinki
  • Tuukka Lehtiniemi: Automatic detection of marginalization | University of Helsinki
  • Fredrik Heintz: Humans in the loop in the HLEG recommendations | Linköping University
  • Anne Kaun: Suing the Algorithm: The Mundanization of Automated Decision-Making in Public Services through Litigation | Södertörn University
  • Laetitia Tanqueray: U-prevent and personalised drug protocols | Lund University
  • Sonja Trifuljesko: Symptom checkers and algorithmic care | University of Helsinki
  • Christopher Gyldenkærne: Re-defining elderly and frail patients through Electronic Health Record data – a case of patients not showing up for diagnostics and surgery | Roskilde University
  • Henriette Langstrup: DIY Artificial Pancreas System | University of Copenhagen