AI and Human Values: Governing the Algorithmic City

A century ago, John Dewey observed that '[s]team and electricity have done more to alter the conditions under which [people] associate together than all the agencies which affected human relationships before our time'. In the last few decades, computing technologies have had a similar effect. Political philosophy's central task is to help us decide how to live together by analysing our social relations, diagnosing their failings, and articulating ideals to guide their revision. But these profound social changes have left scarcely a dent in the model of social relations that analytical political philosophers assume. These lectures make a start at fixing that mistake. Lecture 1 introduces the theoretical resources necessary for this project; Lecture 2 applies those resources to the case of communication in the digital public sphere.

Lecture 1 argues that we are increasingly connected to one another by algorithmic intermediaries - sociotechnical systems such as centralised privately- and publicly-controlled digital platforms and competing decentralised architectures. I call this network of algorithmically-mediated social relations the 'Algorithmic City'. I analyse the intermediary power that governs the Algorithmic City, and contrast it with the extrinsic power exemplified by the state in the physical city. Extrinsic power governs social relations the way a river's banks govern the water; intermediary power operates more like the bonds holding the water molecules together. By constituting the relationships that they mediate, algorithmic intermediaries enable some to exercise power over others, to shape power relations between mediatees, and - over time - to reshape society at large. Sometimes new power relations should simply be eliminated, but algorithmic intermediaries, if governed appropriately, could be crucial to realising egalitarian social relations and collective self-determination in the information age. We must therefore determine whether and how algorithmic intermediary power can be exercised permissibly. I introduce a framework for justifying this power, and show how algorithmic governance raises new challenges for political philosophy concerning the justification of authority, the foundations of procedural legitimacy, and the possibility of justificatory neutrality.

Speaker: Seth Lazar, Australian National University

Room 119