2 November 2023 - AI in the New Corporate Anatomy
2 November 2023, 2-3 PM
Room 223
Melbourne Law School
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Beehive Seminar.
AI in the New Corporate Anatomy
Legal concepts of “Algorithmic accountability” have imposed trivial obligations on firms’ use of AI and automated decision-systems for some time. But these requirements are about to be eclipsed by sui generis AI regulation operating on two registers: the product and the supply chain. As strategies for product and supply chain regulation come more clearly into view, the idea of firm-level accountability becomes increasingly incoherent as responsibility for how systems function and how they are made is shifted elsewhere. Obligations on organisations and firms are replaced by requirements around specific technical capacities and inputs that exist beyond firms’ control.
At the same time, the most useful frame for understanding the question of ‘what is AI?’ - remains the corporation. By this I do not mean to invoke how the corporate structure already models AI as a non-human site of legal personality or decision-making process. Rather, I mean that the organisation, in the way it operationalises AI for specific purposes, is the most coherent way to understand AI as a sociotechnical system.
One way to move through this contradiction is to remap the concept of the firm through its interaction with the political economy of AI. The talk will identify how both the ‘product’ and ‘supply chain’ dimensions of AI, including the intellectual techniques they draw on and the networks of people they coordinate, alter our understanding of firms and organisations, and highlight how the question of AI regulation might best be understood as a question of industrial organisation.