{"title":"The Value of Ambiguity. Data, Proxies and the Limit of the Computable","metaTitle":"The Value of Ambiguity. Data, Proxies and the Limit of the Computable – Latent Spaces - Performing Ambiguous Data","date":"09 May 2022","tags":"event","summary":{"html":"

Documentation of the online event with Mireille Hildebrandt & Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, moderated by Felix Stalder, 22 March 2022.

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In her talk, Mireille Hildebrandt argues, 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. 

With a response by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, where she discusses the structure of proxies in terms of their temporality and logic of representation. She claims that the latent and the manifest are linked together through presumptions of a structure in the ambiguous, the unknown, that enable the construction of proxies in the first place, and then also structures the manifest. This presumed structure of the ambiguous would therefore need to be included in the discussion of the necessity, and the costs of proxies.

Recording of the online talk (1:34:30)

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Speakers

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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 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\").

See also

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Ambiguity, Scoring and Modeling. (De)Quantifying social interaction. Talks and discussion with Martin Warnke and Ben Grosser, moderated by Cornelia Sollfrank, March 29, 2022.

Notes on the workshop \"Ambiguous Tools. Pandemic Tech after Covid\", with Tactical Tech, April 5 2022.

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