“Contestable Infrastructures” at Beyond Smart Cities Today

I’ll be at Beyond Smart Cities Today the next cou­ple of days (18–19 Sep­tem­ber). Below is the abstract I sub­mit­ted, plus a bib­li­og­ra­phy of some of the stuff that went into my think­ing for this and relat­ed mat­ters that I won’t have the time to get into.

In the actu­al­ly exist­ing smart city, algo­rith­mic sys­tems are increas­ing­ly used for the pur­pos­es of auto­mat­ed deci­sion-mak­ing, includ­ing as part of pub­lic infra­struc­ture. Algo­rith­mic sys­tems raise a range of eth­i­cal con­cerns, many of which stem from their opac­i­ty. As a result, pre­scrip­tions for improv­ing the account­abil­i­ty, trust­wor­thi­ness and legit­i­ma­cy of algo­rith­mic sys­tems are often based on a trans­paren­cy ide­al. The think­ing goes that if the func­tion­ing and own­er­ship of an algo­rith­mic sys­tem is made per­ceiv­able, peo­ple under­stand them and are in turn able to super­vise them. How­ev­er, there are lim­its to this approach. Algo­rith­mic sys­tems are com­plex and ever-chang­ing socio-tech­ni­cal assem­blages. Ren­der­ing them vis­i­ble is not a straight­for­ward design and engi­neer­ing task. Fur­ther­more such trans­paren­cy does not nec­es­sar­i­ly lead to under­stand­ing or, cru­cial­ly, the abil­i­ty to act on this under­stand­ing. We believe legit­i­mate smart pub­lic infra­struc­ture needs to include the pos­si­bil­i­ty for sub­jects to artic­u­late objec­tions to pro­ce­dures and out­comes. The result­ing “con­testable infra­struc­ture” would cre­ate spaces that open up the pos­si­bil­i­ty for express­ing con­flict­ing views on the smart city. Our project is to explore the design impli­ca­tions of this line of rea­son­ing for the phys­i­cal assets that cit­i­zens encounter in the city. Because after all, these are the per­ceiv­able ele­ments of the larg­er infra­struc­tur­al sys­tems that recede from view.

• Alkhat­ib, A., & Bern­stein, M. (2019). Street-Lev­el Algo­rithms. 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300760
• Anan­ny, M., & Craw­ford, K. (2018). See­ing with­out know­ing: Lim­i­ta­tions of the trans­paren­cy ide­al and its appli­ca­tion to algo­rith­mic account­abil­i­ty. New Media and Soci­ety, 20(3), 973–989. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816676645
• Cen­ti­vany, A., & Glushko, B. (2016). “Pop­corn tastes good”: Par­tic­i­pa­to­ry pol­i­cy­mak­ing and Reddit’s “AMAged­don.” Con­fer­ence on Human Fac­tors in Com­put­ing Sys­tems — Pro­ceed­ings, 1126–1137. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858516
• Craw­ford, K. (2016). Can an Algo­rithm be Ago­nis­tic? Ten Scenes from Life in Cal­cu­lat­ed Publics. Sci­ence Tech­nol­o­gy and Human Val­ues, 41(1), 77–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915589635
• DiS­al­vo, C. (2010). Design, Democ­ra­cy and Ago­nis­tic Plu­ral­ism. Pro­ceed­ings of the Design Research Soci­ety Con­fer­ence, 366–371.
• Hilde­brandt, M. (2017). Pri­va­cy As Pro­tec­tion of the Incom­putable Self: Ago­nis­tic Machine Learn­ing. SSRN Elec­tron­ic Jour­nal, 1–33. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3081776
• Jack­son, S. J., Gille­spie, T., & Payette, S. (2014). The Pol­i­cy Knot: Re-inte­grat­ing Pol­i­cy, Prac­tice and Design. CSCW Stud­ies of Social Com­put­ing, 588–602. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531674
• Jew­ell, M. (2018). Con­test­ing the deci­sion: liv­ing in (and liv­ing with) the smart city. Inter­na­tion­al Review of Law, Com­put­ers and Tech­nol­o­gy. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600869.2018.1457000
• Lind­blom, L. (2019). Con­sent, Con­testa­bil­i­ty, and Unions. Busi­ness Ethics Quar­ter­ly. https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2018.25
• Mit­tel­stadt, B. D., Allo, P., Tad­deo, M., Wachter, S., & Flori­di, L. (2016). The ethics of algo­rithms: Map­ping the debate. Big Data & Soci­ety, 3(2), 205395171667967. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716679679
• Van de Poel, I. (2016). An eth­i­cal frame­work for eval­u­at­ing exper­i­men­tal tech­nol­o­gy. Sci­ence and Engi­neer­ing Ethics, 22(3), 667–686. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015‑9724‑3