How AI-Adjudication might Erode Law as a Site of Moral Perceptual Progress

The Centre for Data Futures is delighted to welcome Janna van Grunsven (Delft University of Technology) to King's College London to deliver a cross-disciplinary seminar on 7 May 2024. The chair for this event will be Sylvie Delacroix (King's College London) and the commentator will be Professor Jonathan Gingerich (Rutgers University).

Title

How AI-Adjudication might Erode Law as a Site of Moral Perceptual Progress

Abstract

AI and other forms of digital tech are profoundly changing legal contexts. These changes come in various sorts. AI can support and replace judicial processes, but it can also profoundly disrupt existing judicial practices and values ( Sourdin 2015). In my talk, I am interested in AI’s disruptive effects. Specifically,I will argue that AI used for adjudication purposes has the potential to disrupt the law as a site of moral perceptual progress. By this I mean that the law, at its best, enables a moral reconfiguration of how human embodied lives are perceived (namely as the bearers of meaningful sense-making lives and moral personhood). I suggest that AI-adjudication disrupts the law as this site of perceptual moral progress on several levels, thus affecting a dimension of law that is constitutive of its sociomoral value.[1] I will also propose that, in the face of these worries, we might benefit from defending a perception-based approach to adjudication (Cf. Van Domselaar 2018; 2020), which powerfully contrasts with the AI-driven view of adjudication that we might be headed towards.

After the event there will be a drinks reception and we would love for you to join us.

Speaker Bio

Dr van Grunsven is an assistant professor in ethics and philosophy of technology and a researcher on the 4TU.CEE funded COMET project, which looks at the nature of and best practices for engineering ethics education. Additionally, she is the university-wide coordinator of TU Delft’s ethics and philosophy of technology education.

Before she joined TU Delft in 2017, Dr van Grunsven. was a post-doctoral teaching fellow at Fordham University’s philosophy department in NYC (2015-2017). She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from The New School for Social Research (NYC) in 2015 and my BA and MA (Cum Laude) in philosophy from the University of Amsterdam.

Dr van Grunsven is a member of the steering committee of the “Ethics Special Interest Group” of Sefi (The European Society for Engineering Education) and is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Technoethics.

She also joined a TPM-based initiative to thematise and promote neurodiversity and mental well-being among our students (and faculty members) and would be happy to receive input about these important themes.