PROJECT SUMMARY

Person standing in front of large digital screen with landscape image

ADM, Ecosystems and Multispecies Relationships

Focus Areas: News & Media, Mobilities, Social Services, Health
Status: Active

Automated Decision-Making (ADM) has become increasingly implicated in the relationships between people and other species and ecosystems. From delivery drones to digital bioacoustics, smart farming, smart garbage trucks to conservation and computation, proliferating ADM-enabled technologies are situated within and interact in complex ways with both social and eco-systems to create new mediations between humans, technologies, animals, and environments with diverse and unexpected consequences.

This project will make an innovative and transformational contribution to the advancement of knowledge about the impacts and entanglements of ADM with ecosystems and the capacity of institutions to make responsible decisions about ADM implementations, practices, and assessments.

Drawing on interdisciplinary socio-technical research practices, researchers will undertake an inclusive approach that brings together diverse knowledges, methods, and sites. In collaboration with partners and communities this project will produce the ADM+Ecosystem Playbook, a policy and practice tool kit that includes addressing the potential for an environmental impact assessment legislative, policy and standards framework for ADM in Australia.

This project will intervene in the ongoing debates about ‘safe and responsible AI’ to critically examine the ecosystem impacts of ADM/AI and prioritise sustainable futures that benefit society and more-than-human ecologies alike.

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PROJECT OBJECTIVES

To deliver an original account of how entanglements between ADM systems, diverse human stakeholder groups, other non-human species and Australian ecosystems/environments are evolving, with particular attention to Australia’s unique exposure to climate extremes of heat, drought, flood, and fire and demands of automated technologies to cover distance;
To generate new experimental and arts practice based methodologies for investigating, representing and creating public and diverse stakeholder engagement with the relationship between humans, other species and ADM systems, including challenges of environmentally responsible ADM; and

To produce accessible, practical recommendations for policies and standards that enable industry, government, civil society and advocacy organisations to apply a responsible and sustainable approach to relations between ADM systems, eco systems and other species, with the aim of intervening in the discourse, conception, and implementation of ‘safe and responsible AI’ and the wider public and civil society understanding of ADM and its impacts.