Events

14 Dec 2022: Automating Welfare: On timing, belatedness, and perpetual emergence

When:

Dec 14 at 12.00 – 13.15


Content:

Automation has sparked dreams of overcoming human boundaries and boundedness since at least the 1950s. The past decades have however seen a new upswing of imagining the bright techno-future, with artificial intelligence solving societal, economic, and political challenges. This includes increasingly public administration and welfare provision. The process of introducing algorithmic automation comes, however, with intense frictions. On the one hand, the enthusiasm for algorithmic automation within the industry and public sector is still striving. Large-scale digitalisation and automation projects are presented as revolutionising force in public administration and welfare. On the other hand, public discourse is increasingly painting a dystopian picture of the digitally automated welfare state including biases as well as loss of accountability and autonomy. In this keynote address, I take the frictions, conflicts and contradictions that emerge around technological change as a starting point to zoom in on temporalities of algorithmic automation. Considering three temporal aspects of automating welfare – timing, belatedness, and perpetual emergence – I outline the contours of the digital welfare state and consider critical implications of delegating decisions to algorithmic systems. 


Speaker:

Anne Kaun, Professor of Media and Communication Studies, Södertörn University

Where:

Online
 
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