Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Moving fast and breaking us all: Big Tech’s unaccountable algorithms

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

"Many of the world's most powerful algorithms are accountable to no one," write Ellery Roberts Biddle and Jie Zhang. "Companies do not have oversight over how their own systems work." And yet "They decide who passes and who fails in secondary school. They decide who gets arrested and who goes to prison. They decide what news you see first thing in the morning as well as what news you won't see." I think both sides of this statement are exaggerated, but am nonetheless supportive of the main point of the article, which is to call for a human rights framework for algorithms that would "not just set forth standards for how to 'do no harm' or 'be ethical,' but it would help hold companies accountable for those standards, by providing mechanisms for risk assessment, enforcement, redress when harm has occurred, and individual empowerment for technology users."

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 22, 2024 5:10 p.m.

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