Data science and the need for collective law and ethics
This event is proudly co-hosted by HMI and the Centre for AI and Digital Ethics at the University of Melbourne, Thursday 3 December 10am AEDT / 6pm EST / 3pm PST.
Dr Jake Goldenfein, Dr Sebastian Benthall, Associate Professor Tatiana Cutts and Dr Sarah Logan will give this online seminar.
Efforts to regulate businesses doing large-scale data processing typically have their basis in liberalism. Privacy and data protection, property rights in data, and consumer protection models work to protect or scaffold the autonomous decision-making capacities of the individual. We argue that these forms of regulation, and the ethics behind them, are largely incompatible with the techno-political and techno-economic dimensions of data science. Over the course of the 20th century, computer science, cognitive psychology, operations research, statistics and other fields, have converged on an understanding of utility-maximizing agency that, combined with a neoliberal legal configuration, guarantees the supremacy of private corporations over individuals that would know and defend their own individual interests. In particular, platforms, as data-processing businesses within the digital economy, have inverted the relationship between individuals and the market, making the former public and the latter private.
These regulatory paradigms also support the introduction of regulatory intermediaries, and there is now growing interest in theorizing and engineering data governance intermediaries to remedy this ethical and regulatory crisis. Data trusts, for instance, have been proposed to improve the bargaining power of consumers and mollify the most pernicious elements of direct contracting between data science businesses and individuals. Beyond state imposed or commercially operated models, we explore several alternative forms of community-oriented intermediaries and agents that we suggest, on one hand, better respond to the specificities of data science as an economic paradigm, and on the other, take account of the relational nature of data – treating data neither as a commodity to be brokered, nor as a reflection of personality, but as a medium of self-governance that is legally and technically co-constructed through interactions with information systems.
Join a panel of leading interdisciplinary experts including Dr Jake Goldenfein, Dr Sebastian Benthall, Associate Professor Tatiana Cutts and Dr Sarah Logan as they explore the need for collective law and ethics in data science.