Automated Societies

This discussion took place at the 2022 Future Automated Mobilities Symposium, held at RMIT University 20-21 October. Our interdisciplinary panellists from academia and industry will discuss some key issues around the usage of mobility data in designing automated decision-making systems in the transport domain. How has this data been used for good, and good for whom? What are some of the principles...

This discussion took place at the 2022 Future Automated Mobilities Symposium, held at RMIT University 20-21 October. Inclusive design is a necessary element of future automated mobilities systems and technologies. Our panellists will explore the benefits of inclusive design of automated mobilities starting in the lives of people and physical sites where disability is lived and experienced. We will...

This discussion took place at the 2022 Future Automated Mobilities Symposium, held at RMIT University 20-21 October.  Disaster response, precision agriculture, border control, military logistics, and urban delivery all imagine different aerial futures, but each also depends on the transformation of air into skyways. This panel brings together experts on drones, remote sensing, and autonomous...

In this workshop held on 7 November 2022, Professor Deborah Lupton (author/co-author of 20 books and editor/co-editor of a further ten volumes) provides guidelines and advice on how to write a book proposal to achieve a publishing contract. Deborah discusses how to develop an idea for a book, what content should be in the proposal, and how best to scope publishers to approach. Throughout the prese...

Advertising is becoming harder than ever before to hold accountable, which raises important concerns about the legacy of abuses that have characterised the industry. Predatory advertising, discrimination, and the circulation of false and harmful messaging are harder to detect and regulate online because there is no public archive of online ads. The Australian Ad Observatory provides one model for...

Humans have long defined, framed, and designed bots with the primary aim of passing as human and our collection imagination of what bots can do is often restrained by this focus. The question arising from this strong tendency, is whether humans are capable of imagining bots in another capacity. What is the purpose of designing bots that imitate humans, and could bots offer far more? Professor Dani...

Automated transport and mobility services have the potential to transform how we live and move. They offer new opportunities to address entrenched inequalities of access to mobility, relating to disability, age, economic status and location. However, to achieve these possibilities, the development of new technical capacities and data systems needs to be harnessed for the design of future transport...

This panel investigates the dynamic interplay between: discourses framing digital technologies as solutions to the climate crisis and the real material impacts of these technologies on ecologies of living.  Panellists will examine the potential efficacy of digital tech, interrogate its underlying ethics and critically analyse its social, political and ecological dynamics through addressing th...

Streaming media and entertainment platforms like Spotify, YouTube, TikTok and Netflix rely on recommender systems to curate and present selected items from their vast libraries of content.  These recommender systems draw on data associated with individual consumption activities and preferences, bespoke cultural categories, and licensing or advertising deals, and are baked into the platforms’...

Sextech – a space that encompasses dating apps, sexual entertainment platforms and services, networked sex toys, and AI- powered sex robots - has emerged as a site in which sexual pleasure, wellbeing and health are increasingly understood as data. Many sextech products collect significant amounts of intimate data about people’s sexual preferences, sexual behaviour and sexual health, which is both...

Why does trust matter in our relations with automated systems and technologies? What are the risks of not attending to it? And what do we stand to gain by putting it at the centre of our research and practice? Questions of trust seem to be at the core of concerns about the design, application and our lives with automated decision-making. Engineers and technology designers seek to create automated...

As society becomes increasingly datafied and platformised, regulators the world over are keen to address unequal bargaining power, and to promote fairer, healthier digital spaces. Australia’s News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code (NMBC) was one of the first attempts to query the fundamental business model of news media, and it inspired other governments to tackle gatekeepers a...

2022 will be a key year to see where regulatory approaches to Artificial Intelligence will be heading. At this stage, from Brazil to the US and from China to the EU, “risk” is the anchor of the many of these regulatory initiatives whether in hard norms, smart rules or standardisation. This panel will bring four regional perspectives to the discussion to see if these approaches are truly divergent...

News media businesses and working journalists are increasingly engaging with automated decision-making systems across a variety of different contexts. Recommender systems systematically distribute news to online audiences and novel machine learning systems can produce comprehensible auto-generated articles. News consumption is also changing, with companies sending news updates through chatbots and...

Digital transformation is an area of strategic importance for humanitarian and community development sectors, and innovative uses of data and technology are helping address humanitarian needs and empower communities. However, these tools and systems can create new forms of intrusion, insecurity and inequality, often at the expense of the most vulnerable people and communities. We need to work coll...

It is now well recognised across multiple disciplines and sectors that Automated Decision Making and Artificial Intelligence need to be built in a way that is fair, non-biased, and equitable. Yet, a major challenge in achieving fair, non-biased and equitable ADM/AI is a diversity of views and confusion about what these terms mean, how they are conceptualised and contextualised and how they might b...

This panel will feature presentations on the following topics:  - What is a DAO? And why should we care about automated coordination mechanisms?  - If it looks like you’re doing the work, then you’ve done the work, right?  - Unpacking contribution and reward systems in DAOs - DAOs in practice: Governance of and by algorithms  - How are DAOs viewed in the eyes of the law? Are th...

Digital technologies are increasingly entering into diverse spaces of care: from home and health and disability care settings to social services to the management and control of global crises such as COVID-19 and climate change by government and industry bodies. Contributors to this panel explore understandings and sociomaterialities of care as it is conceptualised, carried out, experienced and pr...

ADM is entrusted with consequential decisions in all walks of life. The have the capacity to cause considerable harm as well as good. For example, embodied robots and self-driving vehicles may cause physical harm or property damage; while faulty or biased disembodied systems, such as credit scoring and job recruitment tools, are capable of seriously and unjustly curtailing life opportunities, espe...

Globally, the e-commerce sector has boomed over the last couple years, benefitting greatly from social reshaping by the pandemic. The ascendency of Amazon – and its aggressive entrance into Australia – has been at the centre of much public attention. This panel, based on an ADM+S Seed Fund project, expands the critical analysis of e- commerce. Rather than universalize the Amazon model, our origina...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has probably already made decisions about your life. Platforms use AI and other forms of automation to recommend music for you to listen to on Spotify, to personalise your news feed, and recommend things to buy on Facebook. AI and automated decision-making are also being used across society to solve problems as diverse as improving social services, creating more effici...

Keynote titled: The Ecological Impact of an Automated Society  This talk provides an introduction to the energy and ecological costs that are growing alongside the deployment of AI in society, from the individual choices made by technology consumers to the challenges involved in managing workloads in data centers. The current trajectory of AI adoption, including the hype around specific appli...

Keynote title: Ungovernable (Other is not a category, or is it) States have long sought to make their citizens legible. Big data and automation have accelerated and sharpened the ability of governments to count, categorize and control populations, often aided by the private sector. These attempts at sensemaking tend to break down at the margins, where outliers and exceptions defy attempts at neat...

Keynote title: Operationalising Trustworthy AI Governance: Beyond Motherhood and Apple Pie?  In recent years, ‘AI ethics’ codes have proliferated from a wide variety of sources, ranging from those published by individual tech firms through to collective initiatives from European and international policy-makers, including the EU, UNESCO and the OECD. After years of successful lobbying by Big T...

Keynote title: Beyond the Platform's Algorithmic Power: Constructing Trust, Control, and Capitol in Worker-Platform, Worker-Client, and Worker-Worker Communicative Relationships.  The controls wielded by crowdwork platforms via algorithmic power and the resulting precarious conditions that these facilitate has been emphasized by scholarly research over recent years. This is matched by theoriz...