After the break (AI, Law, and Otter Things #34)
Hello, dear reader, and welcome to a very late issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things. Today's issue has a call for DigiCon blog posts, some ramblings about work-life balance and my next steps, and the usual reading recommendations and cute otters.
As I took a much-needed vacation shortly after sending the previous issue, I will not be speaking much about my ongoing work today. Instead, I will briefly cover a few topics that are only loosely connected. In some cases, I want to share some things I find interesting. In others, I would appreciate some input from you. So, by all means, feel free to skip any particular section. Or even to jump straight to the reading recommendations and cute animals that, as usual, appear at the end of this issue.
Call for blogposts: Digital Constitutionalism
Since its release in January, The Digital Constitutionalist has covered many topics. While the term "Digital Constitutionalism" has often been associated with issues of platform governance, we believe that such issues reflect only part of the changes brought to constitutionalism by the growing uses of digital technologies in society. Accordingly, we will host a conference to discuss how to frame these issues more broadly.
The conference will take place on 24 and 25 November 2022 at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy). Online participation will also be possible. If you want to participate, please submit an expression of interest to digitalconstitutionalist@gmail.com by 30 September. This expression should include your curriculum vitae and a short blog post (1000–2000 words) on a topic within the scope of the conference.
We particularly welcome approaches from perspectives that have not appeared as much in current debates on digital constitutionalism, such as those from public law disciplines or non-European jurisdictions. For more information about the event, please see our website:
DigiCon II Conference – Call for Blogposts — The Digital Constitutionalist — digi-con.org The DigiCon is organizing its second annual conference entitled 'Constitutionalization in the Digital Age', which will take place on the 24-25th November 2022, at the European University Institute/hybrid. We want this conference to be as informal and engaging as possible, keeping to the spirit of dialogue and mutual friendship of our last event. Key areas.
Work-life balance
One of my PhD goals is to finally strike a good work-life balance. This is something of a challenge, due to structural and personal factors. On the structural side, academics all over the world have been suffering from various issues, such as reduced funding, a broken peer review system, and a scarcity of permanent academic jobs (though the situation in law is not as bad as it is in other disciplines). Since I would like to try and stay in academia after graduation, these factors keep coming to my mind whenever I think of taking some time to rest.
On the personal side, old habits die hard. Joining the EUI doctoral programme allowed me to get in touch with many interesting projects. Even though I have been quite judicious in my commitments, I still found myself working on various ongoing projects. Fortunately, this is not a new situation for me: I worked full-time during most of my law degree, and most of my unemployment occurred while I was trying to finish a master's thesis. Nonetheless, I was exhausted by the end of this academic year, so I decided to take a proper vacation this time.
Most of my June and July went to winding down some ongoing projects, which I have spoken about in previous issues of this newsletter. That went well, and I took some weeks off in August to spend time with my dog (Winnie says hi to y'all), catch up with some TV shows, and read and watch some stuff without much instrumental value for my current work. It was a weird experience to force myself not to pursue some weird side projects, but I now feel recharged for returning to work on Monday.
If I could tell younger Marco one thing, it would be "wear sunscreen" to learn how to set limits to his working time, or at least make sure he will be handsomely remunerated for burning the midnight oil. Younger Marco was a stubborn fool, and he would not listen. Please do better than that.
What comes next?
As my vacations come to an end, I am faced with the realization that I made it past the halfway point of my PhD. Side projects notwithstanding, I am pretty happy with what I have managed to do so far, and it seems likelier and likelier that a half-decent thesis will come out of this in due time. Still, I cannot help but wonder about my next steps.
(Not regarding the research itself, mind you. I am blessed with a good network of formal and informal supervisors who have helped me to think about where I want to go and how I should proceed with that. Of course, there is always the old saying: "Everybody has a plan until they are punched in the face". So I like to keep my options open, but it is nevertheless good to have some idea of what to do.)
One thing I should do very soon is to adjust my workflow. Last year, I was playing with org-mode to write down my notes and academic materials. It worked somewhat well, and it was very good to use version control. But I ended up discarding that flow because it made awkward two tasks that are important for me: sharing works in progress with other people and using a robust spell-checker to polish my English. So I am mostly sticking with Word as my main writing tool nowadays, and testing some tools (such as Obsidian) for note-taking.
I should also work on establishing connections with people working in my field. The pandemic years make this way more difficult than it would be in other times. Fortunately, the EUI does a good job of community-building, so I got to know many people working on tech law around here and peers focusing on other areas. Twitter has also been a good venue to at least get in touch with people working on related problems (and shitpost with some of them). But now I would like to do more: attend more conferences, start new collaborations, maybe spend some time as a visitor somewhere. If you have some ideas on these fronts, please send me an email!
Lastly, I would like to fill in some gaps in my education. On the one hand, my hands-on experience with computer science is getting older by the day, as it has been more than four years since my last industry position. On the other hand, being a non-EU scholar working on EU law topics means I am always catching up with stuff my peers learned in their initial legal education. In addition, there are some other non-legal developments that I need to try and catch up with (such as relevant STS scholarship). Hmm...maybe I should set up a reading group for some of these things?
Reading suggestions
Saloni Dattani, ‘Real Peer Review Has Never Been Tried’ [2022] Works in Progress
Nowadays, it is easy to find agreement on the idea that peer review mechanisms are letting academia down. Reviewers are overworked, and editors struggle to find them in the first place, meaning articles can take a long time before being published. Yet, the system seems to have been around forever (except in US law reviews, which have their own shortcomings). Can we do better?
This essay argues that we can. Far from being a natural mechanism for scientific practice, peer review is a recent response to specific challenges in journal credibility. Under current circumstances, however, it now fails to deliver the accountability it is meant to deliver while increasing the time until publication. As the author argues, what is needed is not a set of ameliorative fixes, but a new system for ensuring that scrutiny about a paper reaches its audiences.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, ‘Downtime Is Not an Option – Meet the Stewards of the Cloud’ [2022] Aeon
Data centres are an essential part of digital capitalism, and the author investigates the work of people involved in sustaining them. This brief article, drawing from Gonzalez Monserrate's doctoral research, examines various aspects of data centres and their workers, such as their reliance on metaphors to make sense of complex technical tasks and explain them to outsiders, the social embeddedness of their work, the gender imbalances in the work environment, and the differences between the large-scale data centres of Big Tech and various other kinds of installations.
Clara Iglesias Keller, Regulação Nacional de Serviços na Internet (1a edição, Lumen Juris 2019).
A good overview of Internet policy in Brazil, regulatory priorities, and the actors involved in the governance process. Has two very interesting examples: the then-recent General Data Protection Law and the rules on content moderation within the Marco Civil da Internet, which are distinct from both the EU and US approaches.
Matthijs M Maas, ‘Paths Untaken: The History, Epistemology and Strategy of Technological Restraint, and lessons for AI’ (Verfassungsblog, 9 August 2022)
Technological restraint is often dismissed out of hand as an infeasible approach to AI policy. Yet, history is full of examples of technological paths untaken. In theory, we could learn from them in order to design adequate policies for coping with high-risk technologies. As the author shows, strategic and epistemic challenges mean that drawing conclusions from historical exemplars of restraint is not as straightforward as one might hope. Restraint might nevertheless be possible in some cases, even if history does not provide us with clear blueprints for achieving it.
Vincent AWJ Marchau and others (eds), Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty: From Theory to Practice (Springer International Publishing 2019).
Deep uncertainty comes from situations in which there is ignorance or disagreement about the external context of a system, the system's functioning and boundaries, and/or the outcomes of interest and their relative importance. The book presents five techniques that seek to address the shortcomings of "short" uncertainty techniques (such as probabilistic approaches) when dealing with deep uncertainty and includes application cases for each technique.
And now, the otters
See you, space cowboy!
[tweet https://twitter.com/In_Otter_News2/status/1559290127872049152]