📢📢 I have a new paper in which I argue that the question “Can we make algorithms fair?” is a category error: cs.princeton.edu/~arvin…

A few years ago I became disillusioned with algorithmic fairness research and stopped working in the area. So when I was invited to contribute an essay to the volume “Contemporary Debates on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence” (part of the highly successful “Contemporary Debates in Philosophy” series), it was an opportunity for me to look back and reflect.

The key thesis: “There has been an avalanche of research on how to make algorithms fair, and there has been a powerful movement to turn those ideas into reality. How have things panned out?I will argue that this movement has been only minimally effective at preventing harms from automated decision-making systems. When we analyze why, it reveals two important limitations of the underlying ideas. First, fairness as a proxy for justice focuses attention on too narrow a set of questions. Second, it applies a depoliticized lens that gives an illusion of moral clarity in academic discussions but runs into headwinds when actually attempting to implement it. These attributes are not incidental and cannot easily be fixed. They are integral to what makes the fairness frame appealing in the first place.”

The second part of the paper is constructive: “I advocate for a more ambitious study of fairness and justice in algorithmic decision making in which we attempt to model the sociotechnical system, not just the technical subsystem. The animating question becomes: “How should we design algorithmic bureaucracies?” This will require many shifts including letting go of neat, mathematically precise fairness definitions and embracing empirical social scientific methods. But the potential payoff is enormous in terms of a greater ability to model benefits and harms and much expanded design space for reform.”

The other essays in the volume sound fascinating and I look forward to reading them.

1 What Is Artificial Intelligence and Should We Define It in Terms of Agency?

Sven Nyholm

2 Artificial Intelligence as a New Form of Agency

Luciano Floridi

3 What Can AI Ethics Learn from Medical Ethics, Bioethics, and Animal Ethics?

Paula Boddington

4 What Is Distinctive About AI Ethics When Compared to Bioethics?

Thomas Grote

5 Can We Make Algorithms Fair?

Margaret Mitchell

6 What If Algorithmic Fairness Is a Category Error?

Arvind Narayanan

7 Are Explanations of AI Decisions Morally Necessary?

Emily Sullivan

8 Doing Without Explainable AI

David Danks

9 Nine Philosophical Questions About Privacy 

Leonhard Menges

10 The Group Right to Privacy in the Age of AI 

Anuj Puri

11 Group Rights: A Skeptical View 

John Zerilli

12 Entangling Ourselves with AI: Affirmative Responsibility and the Cultivation of Responsible Agency 

Fabio Tollon and Shannon Vallor

13 Generative AI, Language, and Authorship: Deconstructing the Debate and Moving It Forward 

Mark Coeckelbergh and David Gunkel

14 From “Can AI Be Creative?” to “What Is the Value of Integrating AI into Creative Processes?” 

Caterina Moruzzi

15 What Will Work Be Like in the Future? 

Daniel Susskind

16 AI and the Future of Work: An Egalitarian Vision 

Kate Vredenburgh

17 What Would It Look Like to Align Humans with Ants? 

Vincent Conitzer

18 Could We Control Superintelligent AI? 

Roman V. Yampolskiy

19 The Many Faces of AI Alignment 

Atoosa Kasirzadeh

20 On the Troubled Relation Between AI Ethics and AI Safety 

Olle Häggström

21 Short-Term or Long-Term AI Ethics? A Dilemma for Ethical Singularity Only 

Vincent C. Müller

22 Should We Worry About the Moral Status of Nonsentient AIs? 

Parisa Moosavi

23 On the Moral Status of AI Entities and Robots: A Critique of the Social-Relational Approach and a Defense of the Properties-Based Approach 

John-Stewart Gordon

Carbon-Intensive Activities Sustainable? 

24 Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Refuse: Green Data Refusal and Sustainable AI 

Cristina Richie

25 The Making and Management of Computational Agency 

Ranjit Singh

26 Deepfakes and Democracy 

Claire Benn

27 Should Online Platforms Be Publicly Owned and Controlled? 

Sean Donahue

28 The Tragedy of AI Governance 

Simon Chesterman

29 Can AI Be Governed? 

Gillian K. Hadfield