Technology-Mediated Communication As Co-Production Between Humans and Machines

As the use of technology-mediated communication becomes more sophisticated and comprehensive, there is a corresponding worry that its output is less that of a human agent using mute tools to deliver their own words, and more of a genuine collaboration between human and machine, with an accompanying loosening of our grip on exactly who or what is responsible for the content of the communication. Here I argue that we need not shy away from understanding such communication as co-produced by humans and machines, and how we can keep hold of ascriptions of responsibility for the content of the communication in the way we would for the communication from other collaborations. My proposal is to analyse technology-mediated communication as the product of an collective entity with sufficient internal structure to allow it to act in a coordinated and directed fashion. This combines and gives a novel application to recent work on algorithmic decision-making and collective responsibility, that being Kirsten Martin’s work on the ethical import of algorithmic decision-making within organisations, and Stephanie Collins’s work on group agency and group responsibility. We accordingly should not evaluate the products of such technology-mediated communication in terms of what either the humans or machines are capable of and responsive to, but what those people and resources united by this decision-making process is capable of and responsive to as a collective. I give special attention to how this agential group should be understood as handling the issue that the currently most popular tools for algorithmic decision-making treats its subject-matter as uninterpreted (in terms of arrays of numerical values, rather than the concrete objects that these values are drawn from and meant to represent), whereas communication necessarily must be interpreted for it to have referents and to be meaningful.