Assessing Prospective Harms (vs Benefits) associated with ADM

Project details

Research Program: Data (primary home) and Institutions

Workstream 1: How do current concepts and frameworks of data ethics, data ownership and data rights (including privacy and access) need to be transformed to maximise benefits and minimise the potential harm of ADM?

Project Summary
The project is about assessing prospective harms vs prospective benefits associated with ADM as a first step to amelioration. As a project within the first Data workstream its principal concern is with data. It will take a two-pronged approach: firstly, focusing on individual and social harms/costs that may be associated with automated or semi-automated data processing (including collection, retention, dissemination, and other uses of data) – versus prospective benefits; and secondly, assessing the levels of risk of these harms ranging from nebulous to very significant. (And acknowledging there may be uncertain outcomes and uneven distributions.) The overall aim is thus to have a fuller appreciation of harms and risks as a precursor to thinking practically about amelioration/mitigation of costs. The project will speak to projects in the Institutions program, but it will be more specifically geared to questions of elaborating and understanding the range of prospective harms associated with loss of control over data processing for individuals, groups and society, and indeed the entirety of the living world, as a first step to finding solutions eg in terms of changes in law, or social practices, or business methods, or technologies (or some combination of these).

Project Team

  • Professor Megan Richardson (Lead)
  • Professor Mark Andrejevic
    (Swinburne University)
  • Professor Andy Roberts
  • Dr Aitor JimĂ©nez

  • The project involves collaboration with a wide range of ADM+S investigators

Funding (2020)

ARC Centre of Excellence Automated Decision-Making and Society