Magistrates and voice recognition: reconceptualising agency

Exploring the introduction of speech recognition, an intelligent software system, in the Magistrates Court of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) promted questioning of the notion of agency. In this paper we look to sociology for conceptions of human and machine agency helpful to HCI. In particular we draw on actor network theory and the work of Lucy Suchman for an emphasis on the materiality of agency, the mutuality of human and non-human co-constructions of agency, and the performative and distributed nature of agency. Far from being marked by autonomy and independence, agency can more usefully be conceived as the outcome of the relatedness of human to human, human to non-human and non-human to non-human.