Algorithmic heritage: caring for AI infrastructures

Algorithmic systems play a central role in organising social life. These systems have become established in the public imagination, as 'AI' or, more simply, 'the algorithm', and these ideas are now part of how we make sense of the contemporary world. Underpinning these imagined algorithms are vast digital infrastructures, upon which systems of economic production and consumption increasingly depend, and which are in the process of shaping societies around the globe.

In this public conversation, we suggest that their monumental scale, their role in our economies, their place in our imaginations, their impact on our lives, and the human ingenuity required to produce them all suggest there is a case for thinking of algorithmic systems as industrial heritage. In the same way that we look to industrial heritage to understand how historic systems of production contributed to the world we now inhabit, understanding future societies will require that algorithmic systems are remembered, protected and interpreted through similar processes of heritagisation. And recognising these systems as heritage emphasises the need for their stewardship, highlighting the responsibility of their creators for their actions and effects, raising questions about their maintenance, about the ways they might be retired from service, and about their legacies.

But how, in practice, might these complex systems, with their virtual and material aspects, be approached by heritage researchers and practitioners? How might the demands of heritage sit alongside the contested regulatory approaches, interests of capital, and geopolitical uncertainties that already shape these global infrastructures? And what would a field of algorithmic heritage need to learn from existing work? In the last decades within the heritage sector, important work has been done in working with digital heritage, collecting digital artefacts, and understanding culture that is ‘born digital’. These foundational approaches might be complemented by drawing on disciplines such as science and technology studies (STS) and infrastructure studies to (for example) problematise the distinction made between ‘real’ and ‘digital’ domains, in the same way that the distinction between ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ forms of heritage has been troubled in recent years, helping us to reject the invitation to think of digital things as dematerialised. Current work within digital anthropology would help us better understand the affective and ethical relationships between algorithmic systems and the people in whose lives they do their work, since the meanings they have for people will ultimately warrant their status as heritage.

This event will explore these and other issues, through a dialogue between our speakers and the audience, considering how the principles of care, responsibility and maintenance that are central to heritage practice might offer a different way of imagining 'AI ethics', the ways in which algorithmic heritage might help future society better understand itself, and how we might recognise the nature of the algorithmic legacy we leave them.

Accessibility

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About the speakers

Jane Winters is Professor of Digital Humanities & Director of the Digital Humanities Research Hub in the School of Advanced Study of the University of London, where she is responsible for developing digital humanities. She has led or co-directed a range of digital projects, including the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association: a Network for Research Capacity Enhancement; CLEOPATRA: Cross-Lingual Event-Centric Open Analytics Research Academy; WARCnet; Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities; Digging into Linked Parliamentary Metadata; and Traces through Time: Prosopography in Practice across Big Data.

Jane is Chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition, and a member of RESAW (Research Infrastructure for the Study of the Archived Web), the Advisory Board of the Living with Machines project, the Advisory Board of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, the Editorial Board of the History of Parliament, and the UK UNESCO Memory of the World Committee.

Richard Sandford is Professor of Heritage Evidence, Foresight and Policy at UCL’s Institute for Sustainable Heritage, where his research draws on sociologies of the future and anticipation to explore the ways in which the role, practice and meaning of heritage is changing, and how heritage professionals might best be supported to engage with the future in their work.

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