Grant: How do you reg­u­late tech­no­logy while it is still evolving?

Public authorities are increasingly using new technologies such as artificial intelligence, for example to process cases. But how can they ensure that the technology works as intended? And what rules should apply when its potential and risks are not yet fully understood? 

One method increasingly used by public authorities is the regulatory sandbox, which allows new technologies to be tested in a controlled environment and helps authorities understand both their potential and the problems that may arise in practice. 

But regulatory sandboxes also raise questions about risk and responsibility when authorities not only make rules but also learn through experimentation. 

Associate Professor at CBS Kristian Bondo Hansen will investigate these questions in the research project EXPO, which has received DKK 5,972,262 from the VELUX FOUNDATION. 

When rules emerge through experimentation 

The full title of the project is ‘From experiment to policy: Regulatory sandboxes as speculative administrative infrastructure’. Together with Nanna Bonde Thylstrup from the University of Copenhagen, Helene Ratner from DTU, a postdoc and a PhD fellow, Kristian Bondo Hansen will examine how Danish public authorities use regulatory sandboxes to test new approaches to regulation. 

EXPO focuses on the technologies being tested and also how regulatory sandboxes may change the way public authorities work.

“Who decides, for example, what constitutes an acceptable risk? Who is responsible when new solutions are tested? And what happens to the boundary between public authorities and private companies when they work together to test technology and develop regulation? These are some of the questions that EXPO will seek to answer,” says Kristian Bondo Hansen. 

The project draws on organisational ethnography, critical data studies and anthropological studies of infrastructure. 

“As regulatory sandboxes become an increasingly common way for public authorities to work with new technologies, we need to understand what they mean for responsibility, risk and the relationship between public and private actors.  This knowledge can help inform future work on areas such as AI governance,” says Kristian Bondo Hansen.