Deirdre Mulligan | Sociotechnical Imaginaries of AI and Our Regulatory Futures скачать в хорошем качестве

Deirdre Mulligan | Sociotechnical Imaginaries of AI and Our Regulatory Futures

This talk explores the connection between our sociotechnical imaginaries of AI and our emerging and potential regulatory futures. Historical institutional scholarship brings temporality to descriptions of institutional stability and change; new sociological institutionalism studies the adoption of norms and cultural practices within organizations and how such structures are adopted into law. We bring a STS perspective and a materialist approach to this analysis through the analytic idiom of sociotechnical imaginaries to connect AI assemblages–associated practices, discourses, and performances–to public visions of the future, which direct, stabilize, and shape anticipated regulation. We describe three competing imaginaries of AI–responsible AI, frontier AI, and pragmatic AI–and their reciprocal governance futures. Drawing on empirical interpretative document analysis and qualitative interviews with “responsible AI” practitioners as well as “AI safety” researchers, we describe evolving AI sociotechnical imaginaries through professional technical practices, policy documents, public representations, and discourses. We provide examples of how corporate and technical practitioners endogenously shape standard setting processes, discourses, and research to preconfigure understandings of “good” governance and regulators’ choices. These configurations of material as well as symbolic structures offer an example of how the logics and practices of computer science are being institutionalized in quasi-regulatory spaces among key organizations. This is influencing debates about the content and meaning of law in public legal institutions, setting the pre-conditions for managerialization of law. We conclude with a discussion on regulatory possibilities through the shaping of sociotechnical imaginaries. Proposed regulatory responses should be attentive to sociotechnical imaginaries motivating alternative regulatory visions. This talk is based on joint work with Victor Z. Wang.