Stay in view of the free updates
Simply subscribe to Social affairs Myft Digest – it is delivered directly to your inbox.
What does it mean to be the decision of the agency “fair”? So far, the general debate has mostly focused on the issue of prejudice and discrimination. This is understandable: Most people expect the machines be less biased than humans (in fact, the logical basis for use in operations such as employment) is often given, so it is correct to pay attention to certificate It can be biased, too.
But the word “fair” has many interpretations, and “unbiased” is only one of them. I found myself at the recipient of an automated decision recently, which made me think about what it really means to feel that you have dealt fairly, and the difficulty of adhering to these principles in an increasingly automated world.
I have a personal Gmail account that I use for correspondence on a book project I am working on. One morning I woke up to discover that I could no longer reach it. A message from Google said that my arrival had been “restricted worldwide” because “it seems as if Gmail has been used to send unwanted content. RAM is a violation of Google Policies.” The memo said that the decision was taken through “automatic treatment” And that if I thought it was a mistake, I could submit an appeal.
I did not send any Grajah mail about random mail and I could not imagine the reason for the Google algorithm that I have. This made it difficult to know what to be written in the “call” text box, unlike the melted version of something like, “I did not do that (whatever it is)!” “Please help, I really need to reach my e -mail and my files.” (To my comfort, I later realized that I did not lose access to the drive.)
Two days later, I heard again: “After reviewing your appeal, your account arrival remains restricted to this service.” No other information was given about what you are supposed to have or why the appeal was rejected, but he was told that “if you do not agree to this decision, you can submit another appeal.” I tried again and refused again. I did it several times – curiosity, at this point, about the time when this ring of death can continue. A look at Redit Proposal Others were through similar things. In the end, I surrendered. (Google refused to comment on the record.)
Among the organizers, there is a single popular answer to the issue of how to make more “fair” mechanical decisions that are insisting that people can request a Man for review they. But how effective this treatment is? For one thing, humans are subject to “”Automation of satisfaction with automation– A tendency to trust the machine is too much. In the case of the UK Post Office scandal, for example, where the Pharaohs were incorrectly accused of theft because of a defective computer system called Horizon, a judge concluded in 2019 that people are in the post office Display “Simple institutional stubbornness or refusal to consider any possible alternatives to seeing the horizon.”
Bin Green, an expert in Al -Insaf Al -Khwarizmi at the University of Michigan, says that there can be practical problems in some organizations as well. He told me: “Often the human supervisors are in a narrow timetable – they have many cases for review.” He said, “Many of the cases that I looked at are cases where the decision is based on a kind of statistical prediction,” but “people are not good in taking these predictions, so why will they be good in evaluating them?”
Once the anger of the defects about my e -mail collapsed, I found that I had a certain amount of sympathy for Google. With many customers, the automatic system is the only practical way to reveal its policies violations. Although it was very unfair to have to retract my condition from knowing what raised the system, and no explanation for the risks that should be avoided in an appeal, I can also see that Google is more details about the way the system works, The easier it will be bad actors to circumvent it.
But this is the point. In increasingly automatic systems, the goal of procedural justice is often contradicts that people were fair to them – in contradiction with other goals, such as the need for efficiency, privacy or security. There is no easy way to make these differentials disappear.
For my email account, when I decided to write about my experience of this column, I sent an email to the Google Press Office with details to see if I could discuss the problem. By the end of the day, my arrival was restored to my email account. I am pleased, of course, but I don't think many people will see it in particular.
