Challenges of Automation and Digitalization: Taming Risk

Algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) significantly influence social practices, including economic behaviors. They are used to optimize processes such as human resource management, algorithmic trading, and risk modeling. The automation of economic decision-making is made possible through data analysis, raising questions about ethics and potential biases embedded in data and their interpretation by algorithms. At the same time, there is a growing risk of reproducing existing inequalities and exclusions, particularly evident in the financial sector.

A fundamental element of the emerging algorithmic reality is the advancement of control technologies, which require careful and well-considered regulation. The increasing awareness of the need to oversee algorithms and AI stems from concerns about the dehumanization of decision-making processes and the potential for abuses arising from irresponsible use of technology. Around the world, strategies of resistance to digitalization and automation are emerging—while these strategies may bring benefits, they can also hinder developmental processes.

Algorithms can enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and improve service quality, yet they may also reinforce divisions and exclusions. These processes drive cultural transformations in the era of “algorithmic modernity,” shaping new forms of labor, relationships, and economic structures. Simultaneously, they contribute to increasing uncertainty regarding the impact of automation on social, economic, and personal life.

For instance, datafication is not merely about massive datasets organized by algorithms. It also involves relationships built around contexts and infrastructures, whose nature, dynamics, and uniqueness are scrutinized by social sciences. Do niches form islands, and do islands create archipelagos capable of reshaping social behaviors on a larger scale? This question resurfaces when masses of cooperating individuals appear in urban spaces or public arenas. What is the nature of the bonds between them? Do these bonds enable the construction of more durable ecosystems? To what extent are they influenced by the structural power of larger players?

At the core of the issues we aim to discuss in this session are questions of mobilization, interests, power, self-organization, and collaboration in digital networks.

Topics of Interest:

• Digital exclusions, biases, and inequalities in new technologies.
• Practices for taming the risks of algorithmization.
• Digital control technologies vs. control over digital technologies (control as care, control as efficiency).
• Datafication—criteria, strategies, and ethics of measurement.
• Cultural transformations in the “algorithmic conditions”