Research Focus Group Talk: Re-negotiating the Algorithmic Contract: The Need for a Politics of Potentiality

Jose Marichal is a professor of political science at California Lutheran University specializing in studying the role that algorithms and AI play in restructuring social and political institutions. His book entitled You Must Become an Algorithmic Problem was published in 2025 with Bristol University Press (UK). The book explores the unwritten social contract we have with the algorithms that shape what we see, hear and think. His next project (expected 2026) is entitled Machine Liberalism: Reconceptualizing Rights in the Age of AI and looks at how algorithms and AI are changing our expectations of liberal democracy.

Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Low-Resource Research Ethics Research Focus Group, Department of Classics, and LOREL Lab