Statistical criteria of fairness are formal measures of how an algorithm performs that aim to help us determine whether an algorithm would be fair to use in decision-making. In this paper, I introduce a new version of the criterion known as “Equalized Odds,” argue that it is a requirement of procedural fairness, and show that it is immune to a number of objections to the standard version.

The ongoing explosion of interest in artificial intelligence is fueled in part by recently developed techniques in machine learning. Those techniques allow automated systems to process huge amounts of data, utilizing mathematical methods that depart from traditional statistical approaches, and resulting in impressive advancements in our ability to make predictions and uncover correlations across a host of interesting domains. But as is now widely discussed, the way that those systems arrive at their outputs is often opaque, even to the experts (...) who design and deploy them. Is it morally problematic to make use of opaque automated methods when making high-stakes decisions, like whether to issue a loan to an applicant, or whether to approve a parole request? Many scholars answer in the affirmative. However, there is no widely accepted explanation for why transparent systems are morally preferable to opaque systems. We argue that the use of automated decision-making systems sometimes violates duties of consideration that are owed by decision-makers to decision-subjects, duties that are both epistemic and practical in character. Violations of that kind generate a weighty consideration against the use of opaque decision systems. In the course of defending our approach, we show that it is able to address three major challenges sometimes leveled against attempts to defend the moral import of transparency in automated decision-making. (shrink)

The particular design of any technology may have profound social implications. Computing technologies are deeply intermeshed with the activities of daily life, playing an ever more central role in how we work, learn, communicate, socialize, and participate in government. Despite the many ways they have improved life, they cannot be regarded as unambiguously beneficial or even value-neutral. Recent experience shows they can lead to unintended but harmful consequences. Some technologies are thought to threaten democracy through the spread of propaganda on (...) online social networks, or to threaten privacy through the aggregation of datasets that include increasingly personal information, or to threaten justice when machine learning is used in such high-stakes, decision-making contexts as loan application reviews, employment procedures, or parole hearings. It is insufficient to ethically assess technology after it has produced negative social impacts, as has happened, for example, with facial recognition software that discriminates against people of color and with self-driving cars that are unable to cope with pedestrians who jay-walk. Developers of new technologies should aim to identify potential harmful consequences early in the design process and take steps to eliminate or mitigate them. This task is not easy. Designers will often have to negotiate among competing values—for instance, between efficiency and accessibility for a diverse user population, or between maximizing benefits and avoiding harm. There is no simple recipe for identifying and solving ethical problems. -/- Computer science education can help meet these challenges by making ethical reasoning about computing technologies a central element in the curriculum. Students can learn to think not only about what technology they could create, but also whether they should create that technology. Learning to reason this way requires courses unlike those currently standard in computer science curricula. A range of university courses on topics in areas of computing, ethics, society and public policy are emerging to meet this need. Some cover computer science broadly, while others focus on specific problems like privacy and security; typically, these classes exist as stand-alone courses in the computer science curriculum. Others have integrated ethics into the teaching of introductory courses on programming, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. (shrink)

Neuroscience has begun to intrude deeply into what it means to be human, an intrusion that offers profound benefits but will demolish our present understanding of privacy. In Privacy in the Age of Neuroscience, David Grant argues that we need to reconceptualize privacy in a manner that will allow us to reap the rewards of neuroscience while still protecting our privacy and, ultimately, our humanity. Grant delves into our relationship with technology, the latest in what he describes as a historical (...) series of 'magnitudes', following Deity, the State and the Market, proposing the idea that, for this new magnitude, we must control rather than be subjected to it. In this provocative work, Grant unveils a radical account of privacy and an equally radical proposal to create the social infrastructure we need to support it. (shrink)

Important and original, this book presents an entirely new way of understanding Technology - as the successor to the dominant ideologies that have underpinned the thought and practices of the West. Like Deity, State and Market, Technology displays the features of a modern myth, promising to deal with our existential concerns by creating a fully empowered sense of the individual on condition of our subjection to it.David Grant and Lyria Bennett Moses examine the dynamics of each of these ideologies, showing (...) how Technology shares their mythological characteristics. They argue that this new myth has not only dominated science to establish its credentials but, utilising robust empirical evidence, they show how law has been imbued with mythological thinking. Demonstrating that law adopts a mythological approach in attempting to regulate technology, they argue that the pathway out of this mythological maze is to establish a new sense of political, corporate and personal self-responsibility.Students and scholars working in the field of emerging technologies and their relationship to politics, corporations, science, law, ethics, and any combination thereof, will find herein a wealth of new directions for their studies. Legal theorists and legal philosophers in particular will find much food for thought in the presentation of this new paradigm. (shrink)

Probing the work of key political thinkers from Hobbes to Rawls, this book examines the state as a real, mythological entity. This groundbreaking work explores the contradictions of our views towards, and interactions with the state and will be of interest to scholars of sociology, politics, philosophy and law.

We see the modern State as the most rational form of governing yet devised, and one which properly recognises our inherent individual rights. However, as the histories of colonialism and imprisonment reveal, it is also an intruder into the lives of generally unwilling individuals, constraining rights. This book looks beneath the contradiction to see an entity willingly sustained by all individuals and for which we forgo our responsibility to and for ourselves. We place ourselves in the hands of those interests (...) that promise to deal with our fears and desires the best. Probing the work of political thinkers from Hobbes to Rawls, the book discovers a State that is a real, mythological entity, spreading across social and geographic space and concerned first with satisfying our two passions. Understanding this mythology may allow reason to emerge from its service to fear and desire, so that the modern State could become truly modern. This book will be of interest to scholars in Sociology, Politics, Philosophy, and Law. (shrink)