A workshop organised by FinWork Futures

 

Is AI going to radically transform the way we live and work, or is it rather going to trigger revisions in practices, rules, and standards, without fundamentally altering their character? The past year or so has been marked by media debates that have positioned themselves across this spectrum, going from radical transformation to revisions of rules and standards to maintaining the old golden standards. The closest example is perhaps the debate around using GenAI in academic research, with positions going from embracing it to calls for significantly limiting such uses. Less noticed perhaps in these debates is the fact that practices of assembling and using Gen and Predictive AI tools are contextualised within different professional cultures that have evolved historically. This includes cultures of software engineering that build AI tools, but also cultures of algorithmic capital, as exemplified by venture capital practices; cultures of evaluating evidence of AI effectiveness, or of ‘fact’ establishing within different professional jurisdictions. How do these cultures work and what happens when they encounter one another? Answers to these questions are key for cutting through the noise and bluster of mediatized grand statements and, in turn, obtaining a grounded view on how Gen and Predictive AI work (or not).

 

The workshop brings together a series of well-known social scientists who have worked empirically on professional algorithmic cultures and their societal impact.

 

Event programme:

 

8:30 - 9:00	Registration and coffee
9:00 - 9:10	Welcome
9:10 - 10:00	Christian Borch (University of Copenhagen)  Algorithmic Cultures in Finance
10:00 - 10:50	Alex Preda, David Chen (Lingnan University), Ruowen Xu (WBS) Why Do Venture Capitalists Go To Cigar Bars? Social Relationships in Search of the Next Unicorn.
10:50 - 11:20	Coffee break
11:20 - 12:10	Stella Pachidi (KCL) Unpacking the construction of algorithmic control: Tales from the field
12:10 - 13:00	Gerry McGivern (KCL), Yuval Millo (Warwick) and Priyanka Pandey (KCL) Doing Zoe: Dispositives in the Zoe Personalised Nutrition App
13:00 - 14:00	Lunch
14:00 - 14:50	Anne Krüger (Weizenbaum Institute Berlin) Algorithmic rationality - The construction of research analytics in academic performance measurement
14:50 - 15:40	Neil Pollock (University of Edinburgh) Can AI Govern AI? The Visions, Instruments, and Practices of AI Assurance
15:40 - 16:10	Coffee break
16:10 - 17:00	Louise Amoore (Durham University) Algorithmic Political Cultures
17:00 - 17:30	Concluding Discussions