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Algorithms tell you how to vote. Algorithms can revoke your driver’s license and terminate your disability benefits. Algorithms predict crimes. Algorithms ensured you didn’t hear about #FreddieGray on Twitter. Algorithms are everywhere, and, to hear critics, they are trouble. What’s the problem? Critics allege that algorithms are opaque, automatic, emotionless, and impersonal, and that they separate decision-makers from the consequences of their actions. Algorithms cannot appreciate the context of structural discrimination, are trained on flawed datasets, and are ruining lives everywhere. There needs to be algorithmic accountability. Otherwise, who is to blame when a computational process suddenly deprives someone of his or her rights and livelihood?
But at heart, criticism of algorithmic decision-making makes an age-old argument about impersonal, automatic corporate and government bureaucracy. The machine like bureaucracy has simply become the machine. Instead of a quest for accountability, much of the rhetoric and discourse about algorithms amounts to a surrender—an unwillingness to fight the ideas and bureaucratic logic driving the algorithms that critics find so creepy and problematic. Algorithmic transparency and accountability can only be achieved if critics understand that transparency (no modifier is needed) is the issue. If the problem is that a bureaucratic system is impersonal, unaccountable, creepy, and has a flawed or biased decision criteria, then why fetishize and render mysterious the mere mechanical instrument of the system’s will ?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GlennC on Thursday May 21 2015, @03:12PM
Ever realize that it's becoming more difficult to place blame on any one person or organization?
Sorry folks...the world is bigger and more varied than you want it to be. Deal with it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khchung on Friday May 22 2015, @02:06AM
It is a Darwinian evolution of blame shifting.
Anyone or any organization that are easily held accountable (i.e. blamed) would be blamed eventually, only those who are successful at shifting blame survives. As long as the society focus on finding someone to blame, rather than focusing on effectiveness as a whole, then sacrificing effectiveness for blamelessness is an effective survival strategy.
On the small scale, you can see this happen in any company that have management focus on finding blame whenever something bad happens, you will find passive employees who focus on avoiding mistakes. OTOH, if management focus on fixing the problem when shit happens, then you will see more employees proactively find and fix problems.