Prof. Christian Katzenbach is giving a lecture on ‘Algorithmic Governance and Agency: Imaginaries, Infrastructures, and Politics’ at the University of Cambridge on October 29.
In this talk, Christian Katzenbach offers an understanding of algorithmic governance that works against the routine primacy of the technological, and instead integrates discursive, normative, and technological perspectives into a more complex picture. Discourses play a key role in building up the allure and apparent necessity of algorithms and AI, posing them as solutions to social problems. But discourses can also contribute to resisting and refraining from such developments. From a normative and regulative perspective, automation and algorithmic governance are part and parcel of a complex set-up of rules and normative infrastructures that govern our lives in ever-more digitized societies. And of course, the technological dimension may not be ignored, constituting infrastructures that are in principle quite malleable but result in rigid structures loaded with institutional and economic power once established.
The talk illustrates this concept with a view to algorithmic content moderation on social media platforms, but also speaks to ramifications beyond this case. A key principle to be addressed is the role of agency and its complex entanglement between machines and humans on the individual level, but also between different groups and stakeholders, institutions, and infrastructure on the societal level.