
The algorithm police is coming. Will it have teeth? - n_kb
https://algorithmwatch.org/en/story/algorithm-police/
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OneGuy123
Why do I have a feeling that the way these laws will work will be to add some
"academicaly derived, politcaly approved" bias to certain machine learning
models to push the results in the "correct" direction?

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subjectsigma
That's an unnecessarily cyncial and contrarian view. It's 2020, regulating
software and data is a thing (copyright, HIPAA, GDPR, etc). It's about time we
get on to regulating software design. We wouldn't regulate drivers and not
regulate car manufacturers.

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kian
And yet, we also wouldn’t demand car manufacturers change how they build a car
because races, sexes, or genders differentially purchase, say, lexuses vs
hondas.

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perpetualpatzer
While there's not much meat to the article, the topic of whether and how to
police algorithmic decision-making is an interesting one.

On the one hand, biased resource allocation can be insidious and giving a free
pass to any discrimination that's implemented within a black box labeled
"algorithm" seems foolish.

On the other hand, none of the alternatives I see:

* banning a predefined list of analytical practices, * outlawing a list of input types that may be used, * second-guessing the quality of not-transparently-unjust logic to assign negligence, or * defining a "fair" outcome that's not to be deviated from

seem both administrable and sufficient, especially as the stakes go up and
complexity necessary to improve decision outcomes becomes more complex (turn
left-right-straight given a LIDAR image, predict likelihood to reject an organ
given patient history and donor/patient DNA profiles).

