Reading suggestions (AI, Law, and Otter Things #24)
Welcome to AI, Law, and Otter Things! Due to personal and work reasons, this issue does not include any essays or comments on research news. Instead, I present some readings that might be of interest, divided into three categories: "classical" stuff, work from other areas that caught my attention, and recent materials I liked.
Vintage reading list
Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (First edition, The MIT Press 1990).
I learned about this book from Maaike Verbruggen, who always sings its praises on Twitter. Once I got to read it, I could see why. MacKenzie examines the development of nuclear missile guidance technologies, focusing mostly on competing approaches within the US Armed Forces. In doing so, he presents the drive towards increased accuracy not as an inevitable or natural consequence of technological change but rather as the product of a complex process of conflict and cooperation between various social actors, such as technologists, laboratories and corporations, and political and military leaders. Check it for a fascinating portrait of the contingent factors that make technological development a topic that warrants more attention than being reduced to the application of scientific knowledge.
Herbert A Simon, ‘Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World’ in Martin Greenberger (ed), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (The Johns Hopkins Press 1971).
Back in the 1970s, Simon argued that many organisations in our society, such as the firm, were thought for contexts in which one had to make the best of information scarcity. In an information-rich environment, instead, the limiting factor becomes attention—how can one determine what is useful and what must be done?—and coping with this new scenario requires adjustments to organisations.
Lisanne Bainbridge, ‘Ironies of Automation’ (1983) 19 Automatica 775.
Anticipating much of what is discussed nowadays regarding humans in the loop, Bainbridge examines a broad range of problems that appear when one forces humans to make decisions according to the timing and constraints of automated systems. It provides an interesting repertoire of practical examples and a useful map of the potentials and pitfalls of human-machine collaboration.
Andrew Feenberg, ‘Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Democracy’ (1992) 35 Inquiry 301.
In this paper, Feenberg argues that the democratisation of modern societies requires technical change, given the role modern technology plays in maintaining current hegemonies. Such a democratisation is nevertheless possible, as the meaning of technology is not the product of any technological 'essence' but rather subject to interpretation from its social context and within the cultural horizon. Feenberg's paper suggests how these dimensions of interpretation can be subject to contestation, which may in turn create paths for subverting the role technology plays in society. Another interesting point for lawyers is that Feenberg is not convinced that the law can play a substantial role in democratising technology, something at odds with many regulatory impulses (including some of mine).
Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (Oneworld 2003).
This book provides an overview of life before the Industrial Revolution. Given its scope, the book is necessarily reductive, even caricatural at points, but it provides important reminders of the informational and material challenges societies faced until very recently in history.
Reading in breadth
‘Human Microbiota Research’ (Nature, Nature Microbiology, Nature Reviews Microbiology and Nature Medicine 2019)
Presents 24 milestones in human microbiota research, showing how developments in research technique allowed us to understand the composition of the microbiota, their intra- and inter-individual variation, and impacts on the host's quality of life.
C Cianfrani and others, ‘More than Range Exposure: Global Otter Vulnerability to Climate Change’ (2018) 221 Biological Conservation 103.
All otter species are vulnerable to current climate change trends, especially the African species. The authors examined this by running a model that accounts not only for temperature sensibility but also marginality and niche specialisation when determining the changes to species range.
Michelle Nijhuis, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons Is a False and Dangerous Myth’ [2021] Aeon.
Presents Elinor Ostrom's work on how the "tragedy of the commons", so often repeated in discourse, has little ground on reality. Instead, empowered people can arrive at reasonable agreements at a local level in most cases. The article then proceeds to unpack the implications of Ostrom's work for conservation, suggesting an approach that involves local communities.
Anne Galletta, Mastering the Semi-Structured Interview and beyond: From Research Design to Analysis and Publication (New York University Press 2013).
A very accessible introduction to semi-structured interviewing. It does a great job of conveying the analytical and interpersonal points that are critical for successful interview-based research, presenting at each turn examples drawn from the author's own research on school desegregation.
Tore Bakken and Tor Hernes, ‘Organizing Is Both a Verb and a Noun: Weick Meets Whitehead’ (2006) 27 Organization Studies 1599.
Process approaches to organisations emphasise descriptions of phenomena in terms of verb-processes and not noun-institutions. Drawing from Whitehead, the authors show how nouns are unavoidable but are better understood as snapshots of processual verbs reflecting a stabilised configuration at a certain point in time, rather than something ontologically distinct.
Kieran Healy, ‘Fuck Nuance’ (2017) 35 Sociological Theory 118.
Theoretical thought provides us with tools for addressing nuance, but the pursuit of nuance for nuance's sake (Actually Existing Nuance) prevents the kind of abstraction that leads to good theories, blocks the refutation of whatever theories are produced, and makes for uninteresting theoretical constructs. It also acts as a form of violence through snobbery.
Recent stuff I liked
Cecil Abungu, ‘Algorithmic Decision-Making and Discrimination in Developing Countries’ (2022) 13 Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet.
Current best practices for assessing algorithmic discrimination in decision-making require institutional resources and transparency, as well as an active civil society. In developing countries, independent actors might not have the resources required for knowledge- and capital-intensive governance, thus requiring a more active role for the administrative state.
David Hadwick and Shimeng Lan, ‘Lessons to Be Learned from the Dutch Childcare Allowance Scandal: A Comparative Review of Algorithmic Governance by Tax Administrations in the Netherlands, France and Germany’ (2021) 13 World Tax Journal.
The Dutch Toeslagenaffaire began with the discovery of systemic discrimination in automated tax fraud detection. The authors map three kinds of issues — the impact of mass processing in the right to a fair trial; discriminatory risk evaluation models; privacy and data protection harms — and compare the Dutch legislation and practice with German and French systems. While many of the safeguards in those two countries mitigate the risk of replicating the Dutch situation, deliberate secrecy still poses various risks, leaving taxpayers with little recourse to identify and counter harm.
Salomé Viljoen, ‘The Promise and Limits of Lawfulness: Inequality, Law, and the Techlash’ (2021) 2 Journal of Social Computing 284.
Critiques of tech ethics often present the law as a desirable alternative. This framing does not account that the law may also be malleable to regulatory capture and legitimise unjust practices. At the same time, the law's own legitimacy should not be taken for granted.
Neil C Renic and Sebastian Kaempf, ‘Modern Lawfare: Exploring the Relationship between Military First-Person Shooter Video Games and the “War Is Hell” Myth’ (2022) 2 Global Studies Quarterly.
First-person shooters, such as the Call of Duty series, pay little attention (at most lip service) to civil populations and their rights, thus reinforcing the view that anything goes in war. This is not inherent in the medium, and design interventions (not censorship) may lead to a vision that is less likely to erode IHL norms.
Sofia Ranchordás, ‘Experimental Regulations and Regulatory Sandboxes – Law Without Order?’ [2021] Law and Method 23.
There is little doubt about the legal possibility of experimental regulation nowadays. Yet, most current experiments are sloppy as legal designs and as experiments, and more rigorous design would improve them as information-gathering principles.
Finally, otters
Thank you for your time, and I hope to have some more substantive essays for the next issue!
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