Inaugural lecture: Law, humans and information machines

On Monday 12th of May prof. Nadya Purtova will hold her inaugural lecture, entitled 'Law, humans and information machines', to formally assume her appointment on 1 September 2021 as professor in the field of Law, Innovation, and Technology at the Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance. The Executive Board of Utrecht University invites you cordially to attend the ceremony online. 

The lecture will focus on the tension between how law assumes information impacts the world (through human cognitive interpretation) and the realities of algorithmic processes.

Law regulates information and depends on understanding information. Yet, this understanding is not based on the scientific study of information. Law relies on the ordinary meaning of information: something which has meaning to a human. Information has impact when humans know and use it. This human-centric understanding, however, is unhelpful when law tackles algorithmic processes. Advanced algorithms draw meaning where humans see none and convert information to impact without humans, beyond human grasp.

Data protection and discrimination law are just two legal areas that fall into the trap of regulating information without understanding it, unproductively targeting algorithmic processes based on notions of human cognitive interpretation. Nadya Purtova will bring some examples of the tensions in data protection and other areas of law to illustrate a broader legal problem. She will argue that to control impact of the algorithmic processes, law needs an updated scientifically grounded understanding of information.