ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Actors, Agents, and Experts in Computing and AI: Decision-making and Contested Authority in Automated Realms

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel explores a variety of case studies across decades and continents that interrogate shifting perspectives on authority in the realm of twentieth and twenty-first century computing. When it comes to automated systems, their users, and their designers, the question of who exercises authority and who controls procedures and defines outcomes can be surprisingly fluid. Does authority come from technical process or embodiment of designer intention? Do external forces apply decision-making prior to, in conjunction with, or in response to negotiated technological agency? Past technological moments that anticipated present-day debates over artificial intelligence design, use, and regulation convey that emergent automation is a contested space in which multiple voices shape accidental, pluralist interpretations of the science of computing.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Allison Marsh, University of South Carolina

Individual Presentations

• Locating Authority over AI Agents in the 1990s: Novice Users vs Expert Programmers - Elizabeth Petrick, Rice University

• Agency, Politics, and Ideology in the Histories of Japanese Robotics - Yulia Frumer, Johns Hopkins University

• AI Expert Systems Meet the Crisis of Expertise: NASA, Newt Gingrich, and Challenges to Rules Based Programming in U.S. Technology Policy in the 1990s - Andrew Meade McGee, Smithsonian Institution

Session Organizer

• Andrew Meade McGee, Smithsonian Institution