Public Lecture presented by Professor Gunther Teubner "Human-algorithm-associations as Hybrids: Who is acting? Who is responsible? Who is liable?"

The Allens Hub presented the Gunther Teubner public lecture which was held on 30th November 2023. This was an event held in connection with the invitation-only workshop 'Cognitive Assemblages: Persons, Sensors, Networks'. 

Gunther Teubner is an Emeritus Professor of Private Law and Legal Sociology at the Goethe University Frankfurt, having also worked at the University of Bremen, the European University Institute, and the London School of Economics. 

Mapping Professor Teubner’s path-breaking contributions is an impossible task, not least because his influence spans fields, discourses, and boundaries. Teubner is renowned for his elaboration of social systems theory, including for his system theoretical approach to thinking in and about law. No less impactful are Teubner’s critiques of the state-centrism of contemporary legal thought, as well as his pioneering engagements with globalisation and its implications, his rethinking of conflict of laws, contract law, and comparative law, and his influential concepts of “reflexive law” and societal constitutionalism. A few representative publications include Global Bukowina: Legal Pluralism in the World-Society (1996); Regime-Collisions: The Vain Search for Legal Unity in the Fragmentation of Global Law (2004, with Andreas Fischer-Lescano); The Anonymous Matrix: Human Rights Violations by "Private" Transnational Actors (2006); and Constitutional Fragments: Societal Constitutionalism in the Globalization (2012).

In recent years, Teubner has engaged with digitalisation and its dynamics, most notably in Three Liability Regimes for Artificial Intelligence: Algorithmic Actants, Hybrids, Crowds (2021) and Human-Algorithm Hybrids as (Quasi) Organisations? On the Accountability of Digital Collective Actors (2023). In this work, Teubner reveals the limits of existing conceptual frameworks and the failure of dominant models of accountability, responsibility, and liability, including in cases where human and algorithmic actions are so closely interwoven that they form a “human-algorithm association”. As an alternative to models that assume and frame an individual, Teubner proposes an original framework for attributing responsibility and liability to algorithmic systems and human-algorithm hybrids.

Video of lecture to follow.