Administrative Fairness Lab Conference 2025

I was in York for the Administrative Fairness Lab’s conference. Somehow I’ve never visited before.

The photo above is from York Minster’s stone mason yard, cathedral’s being things that are never done.

One of the sessions at the conference, by Maria Lee and Sam Guy was about due process in the planning system. One of the key ideas I took away was that removing things like consultations doesn’t remove the contested viewpoints they exist to air. Those still exist and some process are there as a safety value.

There was also lots of talk, as there is everywhere, about AI. But this was good talk, rather than the same old same old.

Jed Meers presented findings from prototyping chat bots and automated transcription that included more or less human intervention and how that might impact people’s sense of procedural fairness. Tom Tyler referenced similar tradeoffs and blended human-automated systems.

My dream interdisciplinary mashup at the moment is public sector designers, rule of law people researching administrative fairness, and psychologists researching mentalization/epistemic trust. Somewhere in there lies some of the answers on what decent public AI looks like.

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