Dialogues: Discovering Keywords & Building New Socio-Technical Literacies for ADM Workshop

This two-hour workshop aims to explore the tensions, ambiguities and ambivalences surrounding the language of automation and AI. The language surrounding new technologies matters. Artificial intelligence (AI), algorithm, big data and automated decision making (ADM) are buzzwords that carry substantial weight public and policy conversation. However, they are also unfixed, intermingled and unclear and even contested among different research communities. The picture becomes even messier and potentially more exclusionary when we add value laden concepts like bias, fairness, harms, justice, trust and trustworthiness, transparency, engagement, responsible, learning, expertise, inclusion, vision, work, learning, care (etc) in relation to the things that data, algorithms, AI and ADM systems do in the world – and how they do it.

In the tradition of Raymond Williams’ Keywords project this workshop aims to explore the tensions, ambiguities and ambivalences surrounding the language of automation and AI. This will involve parking our disciplinary lenses and thinking about the way these new technologies reverberate. The goal is to take this into new modes of public engagement, translation and outreach, and to inform our research design.