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France: Discriminatory algorithm used by the social security agency must be stopped.
(www.amnesty.org)
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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Except a computer isn't making decisions here? An investigator is making decisions, the computer is sorting the investigatees. Even if that wasn't the case it wouldn't be ambiguous who to blame, it's clearly on who decided what goes into the algorithm and how it should work
Edit: even beyond who would be legally responsible, as evidenced by this article and others like it people are already holding policy makers and anti welfare instigators responsible. The fall guy being one step removed from the crime doesn't change who made it happen
With a clear set of criteria, you can easily make this argument that the designer of the discrimination system is culpable because they input discriminatory criteria into the system, I'm with you there.
However, with AI, it may easily happen that unforeseen discriminatory behaviour emerges, in which case I would argue it is indistinguishable in practice whether a computer is purely evaluating criteria or making a decision on its own for the purposes of calling decisions discriminatory.
The same happens e.g. when discovering new proteins using AI. AI comes up with a protein, you confirm it's better than the previous one, victory. There may be a better one, but that's not really a concern here. Same can't be said when targetting a group of people with repressive measures.