From 2023 on, fully automated administrative decisions have been legally allowed in Finland. The path to this point, however, has not been straight-forward, as practices in public administration have preceded the legislation. Why did the missing legislation become a problem right now, as computers had been in use in public administration already for decades? How does the current legislation conceptualize automated decision-making and what follows from that? And what kind of changes the upcoming AI Act might bring? This talk is about the nature of this newly adopted legislation, the process that led to it, and the questions that it left open.
Dr. Ida Koivisto is an associate professor of public law at the Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki, Finland. She specializes in critical approaches to administrative law. Most importantly, she has written about the many meanings of good administration, the digitalization of public administration, and the ideal of transparency both in analog and digital settings. For the spring 2024, she is a visiting researcher at the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law.