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Submitted via IRC for Bytram
In the introduction to her new book, Hannah Fry points out something interesting about the phrase "Hello World." It's never been quite clear, she says, whether the phrase—which is frequently the entire output of a student's first computer program—is supposed to be attributed to the program, awakening for the first time, or to the programmer, announcing their triumphant first creation.
Perhaps for this reason, "Hello World" calls to mind a dialogue between human and machine, one which has never been more relevant than it is today. Her book, called Hello World, published in September, walks us through a rapidly computerizing world. Fry is both optimistic and excited—along with her Ph.D. students at the University of College, London, she has worked on many algorithms herself—and cautious. In conversation and in her book, she issues a call to arms: We need to make algorithms transparent, regulated, and forgiving of the flawed creatures that converse with them.
I reached her by telephone while she was on a book tour in New York City.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @03:20PM
is pretty arrogant. I can say so, from having done too much of it over the years.
The FDA is an apologist for the health insurance industry, not a regulatory agency. Same goes for the EPA, DOE, and FCC. Only once in a while do they actually come up with standards that create interoperability between manufacturers or service providers. Don't take my word on it, look at their actual budgets and how they operate.
The question isn't how to administrate the code, it is how to encode the administration. Which is mostly a matter of changing the view of "governance" from one where administrators are expected to come up with ideas, to one where administrators are expected to select from some sort of ISO style standards that are created by the scientific community. Because you can't administrate something that you don't understand at some fundamental level. Before the legal or programmatic solutions can be spec'd out, you have to know what platform you're running on.
The law isn't required to compile. Regardless of how the law is written, the way it operates diverts quite a lot by the time it reaches the bench. IOW, it doesn't have to make empirical sense as a whole, and so it is self conflicting in many places. The judiciary just makes things up to fill in the gaps, in an attempt to give the appearance of homogeny in a fundamentally uncohesive, badly errored, poorly designed system. The regulators (FDA etc.) generally works against clearly interpretable legislation in order ot protect special interests.
The lesson that should be learned from that, is that the only way to regulate is to litigate. Which is to say that if an algo is doing something bad, the purveyors of that algo need to be brought to justice. That is the only reliable mechanism for creating lasting regulatory oversight in this country. You're next question should be: "under what law?". And that is quite simple, because if you have experienced a loss as the result of malfeasance, you can bring a civil suite. It is the judiciaries responsibility to interpret the law. If there is no specific law, then the more general ones apply. You loss still demands reperations, and the courts may assign them to you.
If you look at the law from a programmers viewpoint; the statute isn't the code. The bench law is the code. The statute is badly written API documentation. Which is to say the regulations come after the lawsuits, not before.