bots-as-digital-infrapunctures/content/Section 2 - Harm in Computational Infrastructures/2-introduction-seda.md

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

Seda Gürses is an Associate Professor in the Department of Multi-Actor Systems at TU Delft at the Faculty of Technology Policy and Management, a member of The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest 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. The paper on POTs (Protective Optimization Technologies)¹ she co-wrote, for example, 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"[add page number]. The paper questions current "fairness" approaches, by questioning their limitations and creating space for community-inclusive ways to review them. Following Michael A. Jackson’s theory of requirements engineering, it also proposes to approach computational infrastructures as being far more than a technological system alone, thus shifting focus from the system itself to the economical, political and social context in which it operates.

By questioning how technologies could optimize their mode of operation in a truly just way, POTs provide "means for affected parties to address negative impacts of digital systems" [page number]. The work departs from a thorough consideration of multiple forms of harm caused by computational infrastructures framed as externalities². Examples of such externalities include lack of privacy, discrimination, low wages and surveillance. How a POT might engage with them is then illustrated through a range of activist, artistic and deployed examples of repurposed optimization technologies that "correct, shift or expose these harms".

We will introduce the work of Gürses and dive with her into the following questions:

• What are computational infrastructures?
• What are elements that shape (or are shaped by) computational infrastructures?
• How can we understand the harm caused by computational infrastructures and the systems which deploy them?
• What interventions are possible to mitigate or eliminate this harm?
• What kind of limitations do you see in the realisation of these interventions?

Footnotes

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

2. 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. ↩︎