Regulating Algorithms at Work (November 2023)
Webinar presented by:
Professor Jeremias Adams-Prassl (University of Oxford)
Wednesday 1 November 2023
About the event
This Webinar was co-hosted with Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics (CAIDE).
The promise—and perils—of algorithmic management are increasingly recognised in the literature. How should regulators respond to the automation of the full range of traditional employer functions, from hiring workers through to firing them? In this talk, Jeremias identified two key regulatory gaps—an exacerbation of privacy harms and information asymmetries, and a loss of human agency—and set out a series of policy options designed to address these novel harms.
Redlines (prohibitions), purpose limitations, and individual as well as collective information rights are designed to protect against harmfully invasive data practices; provisions for human involvement ‘in the loop’ (banning fully automated terminations), ‘after the loop’ (a right to meaningful review), ‘before the loop’ (information and consultation rights) and ‘above the loop’ (impact assessments) aim to restore human agency in the deployment and governance of algorithmic management systems.
View the webinar recording
About the speaker
Jeremias Adams-Prassl is Professor of Law at Magdalen College, and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. He read law at Oxford, Paris, and Harvard Law School, and is the author of over 100 articles and books, including most recently Humans as a Service: the Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy (OUP 2018) and Great Debates in EU Law (Bloomsbury 2021). His work has been recognised by prizes and awards including the Modern Law Review’s Wedderburn Prize, a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award, an ESRC Outstanding Impact in Public Policy Prize, and the 2020 Leverhulme Prize. Since April 2021, he has led a five-year interdisciplinary research project on Algorithms at Work, funded by the European Research Council. Jeremias tweets at @JeremiasPrassl.