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This is the repository for the online module Bots as Digital Infrapuncture, commissioned by the Utrecht University
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bots-as-digital-infrapunctures/content/Section 2 - Harm in Computa.../2-introduction-seda.md

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Title: Introduction: Seda Gürses Slug: 02-s2-introduction Date: 2020-11-01 12:01 Summary: Seda Gürses, computational infrastructures & POTs (Protective Optimization Technologies)

Seda Gürses is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Multi-Actor Systems at TU Delft at the Faculty of Technology Policy and Management, and an affiliate at the COSIC Group at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), KU Leuven. Beyond her academic work, she also collaborated with artistic initiatives including Constant vzw, Bootlab, De-center, ESC in Brussels, Graz and Berlin.

Gürses' work provides us with handles to study computational infrastructures. Specifically the paper she co-wrote on POTs (Protective Optimization Technologies)1, which proposes forms of critical optimization practices. Such practices "aim at addressing risks and harms that cannot be captured from the fairness perspective and cannot be addressed without a cooperative service provider". The paper questions current "fairness" approaches, by inquiring their limitations and creating space for alternative ways to review them. An important factor in this paper is the proposal to approach computational infrastructures as something that is far more than a technological ecosystem alone, thus shifting focus from the system itself to the economical, political and social context in which the system operates.

By questioning how technologies could optimize their mode of operation in a truly fair way, POTs provide means for affected parties to address negative impacts of digital systems. The work departs from a thorough consideration of multiple forms of harm framed as externalities caused by computational infrastructures. Examples of such externalities include privacy, discrimination, low wages and surveillance. How a POT could possible engage with these externalities is furthermore illustrated through a range of activist, artistic and deployed examples of repurposed optimization technologies that correct, shift or expose these harms. Externalities is one of the concepts and phrases in the paper that are borrowed from software and requirements engineering, and from economics and social sciences.


Footnotes

  1. Bogdan Lulynych, Rebekah Overdorf, Carmela Troncoso, Seda Gürses "POTs: Protective Optimization Technologies" (2020). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02711.pdf ↩︎