Abstract
Critics of artificial intelligence have suggested that the principles of fairness, accountability and transparency (FATE) have been used for ‘ethics washing’, in order to appease industrial interests. In this article, we develop this relational and context-dependent analysis, arguing that ethics should not be understood as abstract values or design decisions, but as socio-technical achievements, enacted in the practices of students, teachers and corporations. We propose that the ethics of using AI in education are political, involving the distribution of power, privilege and resources. To illustrate this, we trace the controversies that followed from an incident in which a student was misclassified as a cheat by an online proctoring platform during the Covid-19 lockdown, analysing this incident to reveal the socio-technical arrangements of academic integrity. We then show how Joan Tronto’s work on the ethics of care can help think about the politics of these socio-technical arrangements — that is, about historically constituted power relations and the delegation of responsibilities within these institutions. The paper concludes by setting the immediate need for restorative justice against the slower temporality of systemic failure, and inviting speculation that could create new relationships between universities, students, businesses, algorithms and the idea of academic integrity.
Highlights
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal, Satires, 1st-2nd Century).1 3 Vol.:(0123456789)Postdigital Science and EducationA university student stands accused of academic dishonesty during the Covid19 lockdown
Irrespective of whether justice was served, might there be better ways of being with algorithms in the university? Building on the feminist speculative ethics articulated by Puig de la Bellacasa (2011, 2017), we show how Tronto’s landmark work on the ethics of care (Tronto 1993) can be deployed to think about the politics of these socio-technical arrangements — that is, about the historically constituted power relations and delegation of responsibilities within educational institutions
Drawing from Spier’s work on inclusion in higher education (Spier 2019), we argue that ‘careful’ repair of broken academic integrity systems requires ‘mixed modes’ of response that are attuned to the temporal dynamics of care practices: This sensibility of time challenges the idea that the educators’ wisdom relies on ‘knowing-how’
Summary
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal, Satires, 1st-2nd Century). A university student stands accused of academic dishonesty during the Covid lockdown. Building on the feminist speculative ethics articulated by Puig de la Bellacasa (2011, 2017), we show how Tronto’s landmark work on the ethics of care (Tronto 1993) can be deployed to think about the politics of these socio-technical arrangements — that is, about the historically constituted power relations and delegation of responsibilities within educational institutions. We conclude that those involved with monitoring academic integrity must attend to the temporalities of how ethics and justice are co-constituted through the entangled everyday practices of the university workplace. These ‘Critical Care’ studies of technology design and use illustrate how ethics often operate in tension with justice — how ethical aspirations to ‘do good’ are entangled in politically charged care practices that are ‘ambivalent, contextual, and relational’ (Martin et al 2015: 631) and can be fraught with histories of sexism, racism, capitalism and colonialism (Murphy 2015)
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