Anthony Elliott
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Distinguished Professor Anthony Elliott AM is Executive Director of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence for Digital Transformations at Adelaide University, Australia.
He is also Super-Global Professor of Sociology (Visiting) at Keio University, and Visiting Professor of Sociology at UCD, Ireland.
He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK; Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia; Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society; and; Senior Member of King’s College, Cambridge. He currently serves as a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts.
In 2019, Prof. Elliott served as a member of the Expert Working Group of the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) on AI at the request of the Prime Minister’s Commonwealth Science Council. He has received many awards, including as Member of the Order of Australia in the King’s Birthday Honours 2023 for significant service to education, social science policy and research and the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the University of Melbourne. He is the author and editor of more than fifty books translated into dozens of languages, including most recently Making Sense of AI (2022), Algorithmic Intimacy (2023) and Algorithms of Anxiety (2024).
Anthony Elliott joins the Paris IAS in September 2026 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
Contemporary social theory; sociology of the digital revolution; the social organization of digital technologies; the impact of the digital revolution on identity and personal life; globalization studies; and theories of self, identity and subjectivity.
Transformations of Agency: Some Consequences of Outsourcing Decision-Making to Smart Machines
We delegate more and more decisions and tasks to artificial agents, machine-learning algorithms, GenAI - or, in other words, to smart machines. This rapid growth in the externalisation (sometimes called ‘outsourcing’) of human decision-making to emerging technologies has brought about fundamental changes in the communication, storage, dissemination and repurposing of knowledge in contemporary societies. But these transformations also raise serious questions about human agency, about the importance of autonomy and the changing nature of public and private life.
The project develops a systematic and wide-ranging analysis of the digital externalisation of agency in the age of artificial intelligence. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, the project integraes social theories and empirical evidence from a wide range of sources in sociology, science and technology studies, political science, and public policy. The project begins through developing an analysis of some key characteristics of the digital outsourcing of decision-making, drawing out important distinctions between technologies as agents of change in the public domain as compared to developments in personal life. Seeking to advance recent debates in this area, the focus is specifically on how digital delegations of decision-making to smart machines are experienced by individuals, both the individuals whose lives are directly transformed by automated processes and the individuals who observe these developments. In doing so, the research will emphasize why the outsourcing of decision-making to smart machines matters and why this phenomenon is becoming more prevalent today.
The second part of the project involves an integrative analysis of the theoretical literature with the broader objective of outlining an alternative approach to this widespread phenomenon. The conceptual innovation here will consist in demonstrating that the delegation of decision-making to digital technologies involves struggles in the public domain and private life in which agency and autonomy are at stake. Building upon the Elliott's recent research in the field, especially Algorithmic Intimacy (2023, Polity) and Algorithms of Anxiety (2024, Polity), the project will develop the argument that such outsourcing of decisions to smart machines do not necessarily erode agency and undermine autonomy, but that they have the capacity to do so.
Key publications
Elliott Anthony, Algorithms of Anxiety: Fear in the Digital Age, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024.
Elliott Anthony, Algorithmic Intimacy: The Digital Revolution in Personal Relationships, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023
Elliott Anthony, Making Sense of AI: Our Algorithmic World, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021
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