Antti Rannisto
Ethnographer, Solita
Antti Rannisto is a sociologist and ethnographer at Solita’s Design & Strategy team. For the past 10+ years he has worked with applied social science in service and product design, organisational change, brands and communications. Much of Antti’s current work revolves around social implications of new technologies, helping organisations balance and better position human and non-human agency in sociotechnical systems.
Algorithms and Agency
Processes previously carried out by human agents are altered due to introduction of algorithmic solutions, making these processes sometimes more complex and/or operationally more autonomous in relation to humans. Because of this complexity and autonomous nature these processes are more difficult to perceive, understand and grasp, thus making it more challenging for us as individuals, communities and societies to respond to challenges posed by them.
Our aim in the AIGA project (Artificial intelligence Governance and Auditing) is to equip these technologies and their usage with more robust reflexive capacities. I will present some of the work done this far focusing on two very different cases where human agency is entwined with algorithmic technologies.
First, I will look from the ground-up how these technologies are perceived, lived and dealt with on the everyday level of citizens; how algorithmic interactions are made sense of and challenges mitigated with everyday tactics and heuristics of agential control. This will include notes from our ongoing qualitative work regarding the usage of the Finnish Covid-19 tracing app Koronavilkku and other algorithmic applications.
Downloading and using the tracing app is voluntary and based on individual decision; however, on the level of the population, the application needs to be widely acquired and used in order to grasp the chains on contagion. Thus, enrolling such an application requires construction of motivation for individual users.
Our fieldwork with Finnish citizens illustrates how motivation and reflexivity is simultaneously built on this everyday level. We have been looking at certain specific practices building such motivation: the normative pressure of fighting a socially shared threat; the project’s closeness to widely trusted public authorities; and instances of testimonials by independent experts and overall the treatment of the application in the public sphere during its enrollment.
Secondly, to contrast and highlight another locus of agency, I will look at a top-down case of such agentic control, in which a public institution initiates and conducts an auditing process of an AI-powered system used in the context of municipal democracy.