_{Our events are held in person or hybrid mode, as specified. All indications refer to Paris time. While some events are only accessible upon invitation, you can always get in touch for further information.}

✨ Events this year 2024-25

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FORTHCOMING IN 2025

23 January. Technopolice: Police Surveillance in the Age of AI

With Félix Tréguer

About the speaker: Félix Tréguer is associate researcher at the CNRS Center for Internet and Society and member of the digital rights advocacy group La Quadrature du Net. His interdisciplinary research focuses on the political history of the Internet and computing, practices of power such as censorship and surveillance, and algorithmic governmentality of public space. His CV is available here.

Description: In this session, we will discuss Félix's book Technopolice (2024, Divergences). Looking at drones, predictive software, algorithmic video-surveillance and facial recognition, Félix argues that the use of these technologies of control, far from curbing crime, is actually amplifying state violence. Drawing on experiences and knowledge forged during recent struggles against police surveillance, he claims that the growing resort to tech policing places the city under siege and close up our political imaginations, and that the techno-solutionist hegemony is fueling to the ongoing authoritarian drift.

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20 March. ELUSIVE ADAPTABILITY: Feedback Mechanisms in Military AI and International Humanitarian Law

With Klaudia Klonowska

About the speaker: Klaudia Klonowska is a Ph.D. Candidate in International Law at the Asser Institute and the University of Amsterdam since September 2021. She studies the interactions of humans and AI-enabled decision-support systems in the military decision-making process and the relation to international humanitarian law. She is a member of the research project Designing International Law and Ethics into Military Artificial Intelligence (DILEMA). During the PhD, she has conducted expert interviews with military professionals, including in the Netherlands and the United States and concluded a research stay with the West Point Military Academy. Prior to starting the PhD, she has critically analyzed autonomous weapons with the Hague Center for Strategic Studies, watchlisting and counterterrorism activities with the Global Counter-terrorism Forum, and European Union surveillance exports with Amnesty International. Her full CV is available here.

Description: The use of AI in military operations is often celebrated for its potential to “learn” and adapt to dynamic combat environments, leveraging machine-learning algorithms and feedback loops to refine predictions and recommendations. Yet, the practical realities of embedding such feedback mechanisms reveal significant disruptions to this promise of adaptability. Rather than ensuring continuous enhancement, feedback loops risk embedding biases, distorting data interpretation, and undermining system performance. Drawing on interviews with engineers and computer science literature, this presentation will interrogate the feedback loop processes accompanying implementation and updating of AI systems. Situating these findings within the broader discourse of international humanitarian law (IHL), the analysis exposes how these adaptive processes complicate adherence to fundamental IHL principles and challenge the established legal review of warfare technologies. In tracing the cyclical nature of feedback in military AI, this paper highlights how the anticipated repetition that should bring refinement instead reveals an elusive adaptability that fractures the coherence of traditional IHL norms. This work thus contributes to a more granular understanding of how AI technologies shape military decision-making and can more broadly also inform research on AI tech in other domains.

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Passed events

5 December. Reflecting on law, code and exploitation: corporations and the working conditions of the digital proletariat

With Aitor Jiménez González

About the speaker: Aitor Jiménez is based at International Institute for the Sociology of Law as Ramon y Cajal Professor and is a Professor at the University of the Basque Country. He is also affiliated with the University of Melbourne Criminology Department and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. He has a transdisciplinary academic and professional background in law, sociology, criminology, and politics and his research and teaching are informed by his commitment to social, environmental, and anticolonial struggles. His latest book, The Crimes of Digital Capitalism Corporate Crime in an Age of Exploitation, will be published in March 2025 by NYU Press. His full bio is available here.

About the session: The session will build on Aitor’s paper ‘Law, Code and Exploitation: How Corporations Regulate the Working Conditions of the Digital Proletariat’, published in 2022 in Critical Sociology.

The abstract  of the paper reads as follows: “Contrary to what orthodox Marxism claims, the article defends that the legal field has been a fundamental aspect of the capitalist social ordering, and an unavoidable feature to understand how dominated subjectivities are produced and exploited. Expanding Lessig’s concept of ‘code as law’ with Marxist scholarly insight, the article argues that digital capitalists are reorganising work and the labour force through a form of algorithmic regulation. The article states that algorithms – that is, digital machines – have become not only part of the means of production of the era of automation, but also the code by which capitalists are writing the conditions of existence and exploitation of the digital proletariat. The article bridges recent contributions on labour law, AI and algorithmic regulation with the latest Marxist sociological contributions analysing the relation of work and digital exploitation, opening with it new ways to understand how sociotechnical systems owned by corporations regulate the behaviour not only of the working class but of the wider citizenry.”

To follow the session, participants invited to read the paper and the text of the EU AI Act.

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21 November. A right to a human decision (Guest lecture)

With Aziz Huq

About the speaker: Aziz Z. Huq is Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, School of Law. He is a scholar of US and comparative constitutional law. His recent work concerns democratic backsliding and the regulation of AI. His award-winning scholarship is published in several books and in leading law, social science, and political science journals. His full bio is available here.

Abstract from Aziz Z. Huq, ‘A Right to a Human Decision’, published in Virginia Law Review, volume 106, issue 3 and available here:

“Recent advances in computational technologies have spurred anxiety about a shift of power from human to machine decision makers. From welfare and employment to bail and other risk assessments, state actors increasingly lean on machine-learning tools to directly allocate goods and coercion among individuals. Machine-learning tools are perceived to be eclipsing, even extinguishing, human agency in ways that compromise important individual interests. An emerging legal response to such worries is to assert a novel right to a human decision. European law embraced the idea in the General Data Protection Regulation. American law, especially in the criminal justice domain, is moving in the same direction. But no jurisdiction has defined with precision what that right entails, furnished a clear justification for its creation, or defined its appropriate domain.

This Article investigates the legal possibilities and normative appeal of a right to a human decision. I begin by sketching its conditions of technological plausibility. This requires the specification of both a feasible domain of machine decisions and the margins along which machine decisions are distinct from human ones. With this technological accounting in hand, I analyze the normative stakes of a right to a human decision. I consider four potential normative justifications: (a) a concern with population-wide accuracy; (b) a grounding in individual subjects’ interests in participation and reason giving; (c) arguments about the insufficiently reasoned or individuated quality of state action; and (d) objections grounded in negative externalities. None of these yields a general justification for a right to a human decision. Instead of being derived from normative first principles, limits to machine decision making are appropriately found in the technical constraints on predictive instruments. Within that domain, concerns about due process, privacy, and discrimination in machine decisions are typically best addressed through a justiciable “right to a well-calibrated machine decision.”

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22 October. A matter of fundamental rights: discrimination and vulnerabilities in the algorithmic age

With Raphaële Xenidis (Sciences Po), Gianclaudio Malgieri (Leiden University) and Lucas Anjos (Sciences Po)

As datafication and automation take root in society, attention should be drawn onto the ways in which technology mediates, organises, and normalises human and social vulnerabilities. To address some of those vulnerabilities, recent legislative packages such as the DSA, the AI Act or the proposed AI Liability Directive attempt to complement existing legal tools such as fundamental rights and non-discrimination law by injecting elements of a risk-based approach into the more traditional rights-based approach to regulation. Yet, numerous critiques have addressed the shortcomings of this odd regulatory mix: the focus on product liability, with its demands for standardisation and risk management, is difficult to reconcile with the legal imperatives of fundamental rights.

In this conversation, Gianclaudio Malgieri and Raphaele Xenidis will reflect on how the concept of harm and associated regulatory schemes can foster better responses to AI-driven inequality, power imbalances and social injustices. Specific comments will refer to Prof. Malgieri and Cristiana Santos’ paper on Assessing the (Severity of) Impacts on Fundamental Rights, openly accessible on SSRN.

Further information about the event and the speakers are available here.

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20 November. Making Sense of Responsibility for Structural Injustice in the Global Data Value Chain

With Kebene Wodajo

About the speaker: Kebene Wodajo is a senior scientific assistant and lecturer at Ethics, Technology and Society, ETH Zurich. Before taking her current position she was a senior research fellow at the Institute for Business Ethics, University of St. Gallen. Her research focuses on questions of social justice with a focus on structural injustice and attribution of responsibility in a technological society. She draws on interdisciplinary perspectives: critical (international) law and technology, critical race theories, Business and Human Rights, and Afro-communitarian philosophy.

Description: This contribution examines the issue of responsibility in the Global Data Value Chain (GDVC) concerning structural injustices. Within this scaffolding, it asks: how do current responsibility frameworks – especially the network-oriented responsibility regime—grapple with the structural risks embedded in the GDVC? Moreover, how might these frameworks be enhanced to account for the deeper structural factors through a duty-oriented ethics? In exploring these questions, it focuses on the function of both law and technology, particularly legal responsibility and the data value chain, within social institutions and their emergent interactions. By embracing a non-essentialist and non-formalist perspective, it examines the key features of the GDVC within the context of the social relations and institutions it mediates, and how these shape the attribution of responsibility for structural injustice in the GDVC.

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8 October. Lost in conversation: uncertainty, value-alignment and LLMs

With Sylvie Delacroix (King’s College London)

About the speaker: Sylvie Delacroix holds the inaugural Jeff Price Chair in Digital Law in King’s College London. She is also a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. Her research focuses on pre-reflective agency, bottom-up data empowerment and the social sustainability of the data ecosystem that makes generative AI possible. Her latest book -Habitual Ethics? was published by Bloomsbury in 2022. @SylvieDelacroix | https://delacroix.uk

Description: abstract by the author available in the attachment below

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