Re-humanising Automated Decision-Making

Processes and technologies of automation are increasingly transforming and challenging everyday life, organisations and institutions. Automation has changed from making things to making important decisions about people’s lives and opportunities based on algorithmic data processing. Such Automated Decision-Making (ADM) is often understood as a mechanism for making decisions on automated grounds without human involvement. However, in fact, humans are involved in every stage of such decision-making. Social science research shows not only that humans are involved in these processes but how they are involved. The imagined absence of people in ADM systems limits the capacity of ADM to make decisions designed to align with societal structures and to resonate with the complexity of people’s everyday lives.

The proposed network will bring together researchers from different disciplines to meet the challenge of re-humanising ADM. The starting point is to approach the complexities of ADM by re-establishing the human as an actor in the human-machine relationships emerging in the wake of recent ADM technologies and discourses. The overall research question for the network is: How can the research and design of ADM be humanised by accounting for the presence of people, rather than assuming their absence? What does ‘automation’ mean in this context, and how do humans intervene in and support machine decision-making?