The Value of Ambiguity. Data, Proxies and the limits of the computable
Channel: latent spaces
Date: 2022-03-23

with Mireille Hildebrandt & Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, moderated by Felix Stalder
22.3.2020


Mireille Hildebrandt: 
The politics of ambiguity and the issue of proxies 

In my talk, I will argue that what matters is not computable. However, it can be made computable, and in different ways. This difference in turn matters, it makes a difference for those who will suffer or enjoy the consequences. To make things computable developers need proxies, as computing systems cannot deal with the ambiguity of the languages we live in. Decisions on disambiguation and the choice of proxies have far-reaching implications, There is a politics in these design decisions that requires our keen attention. This is where transparency and agonistic debate are pertinent. 

Mireille Hildebrandt is a lawyer and philosopher who works at the intersection of law and computer science. She is the Research Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel[1] and at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is also the principal investigator of the 'Counting as a Human Being in the Era of Computational Law' project (2019–2024). The research targets two forms of computational law: machine learning and blockchain technology.

Among her many publications, the most relevant for this series is:     
Hildebrandt, Mireille. 2019. “Privacy as Protection of the Incomputable Self: From Agnostic to Agonistic Machine Learning.” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 20 (1): 83–121.


Wendy Hui Kyong Chun:
The Politics of Proxies 

Data proxies spell trouble and they are everywhere. They are the interfaces where the unknowable is translated into the known. They provide a measure for that which cannot be measured. As such, they are full of political assumptions, troubling the clean separation between data and model. The inherent ambivalence of proxies can open the space for a critique that is less about whether the models "get it right", but about which models we want. 

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. Since its launch in 2019, she leads the Digital Democracies Institute which aims to integrate research in the humanities and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice in order to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms, and mis/disinformation by fostering critical and creative user practices and alternative paradigms for connection.

Among her many publications, the most relevant for this series is:
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2021. Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (in particular, the section on "proxies").

This is the first event of a three-part series of talks and workshops that explore ambiguity and data.