#algorithmic accountability

There is a particular kind of organisational confidence that comes with deploying a well-performing AI system. The false positive rate is down. Throughput is up. The security operations team has more time for higher-order work because routine triage is automated. The board has been told that AI is now part of the control framework, and the slide deck looks convincing. What the slide deck rarely…

Bureaucracy, Legitimacy, and the Pace of Structural Change -An analysis of how artificial intelligence pressures universities, corporations, courts, and public agencies to evolve faster than their bureaucratic design allows, arguing that institutional legitimacy now depends on deliberate, polycentric adaptation rather than reactive modernization. Artificial intelligence does not merely…

Care is not exhausted by proximity of bodies, nor by the sentimental aesthetics of compassion that populist rhetoric so eagerly weaponises; it is also encoded in infrastructures, protocols, architectures of signal and response that determine whether vulnerability is met with amplification of agency or with extraction of data, and therefore any serious analysis of technological care must begin by…

-An examination of how artificial intelligence will be shaped not by code alone but by procurement policy, corporate power, geopolitical divergence, and the institutional decisions that determine whether the interface elevates or destabilizes democratic society. Power, Structure, and the Architecture of Artificial Intelligence In earlier essays, we examined displacement, benefit, civilizational…

The digital economy treats human attention as a raw material to be mined without limit. However, this extraction produces a specific, harmful byproduct: it breaks our focus, fractures shared reality, and wears down the patience required for moral reasoning. Unlike physical pollution, which damages the air or water, this cognitive waste damages our ability to think. While corporations are…

As leading technology companies have grown exponentially over the last decade, so too have concerns about their outsized impact on our economy and democracy. How to regulate these firms has emerged as a key policy question of our time.  Racial equity is not yet a significant part of the mainstream tech policy debate. This needs to change. How we set the rules for these companies will have significant consequences throughout society, particularly for low-income communities and communities of color. As we consider policy choices, we must ask: Will these new technology policies serve to erase racial inequities and set us on a course of inclusive prosperity? Or, will they serve to deepen existing inequities? This report makes the case for centering racial equity in the technology policy debate and presents a policy agenda for doing so. Through original researchcommissioned from academic experts in the field, a literature review, a policy landscape analysis, and interviews with subject-matter experts, we examined the business model underlying the largest technology firms and its impacts on people and communities of color. We found that the interlocking components of its business model exacerbate racial inequities in access to quality jobs and business opportunities, information, goods and services, and in democratic participation. This report charts a policy path toward a tech sector and economy organized around equity: just and fair inclusion in a society in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential, including the nearly 100 million people in the US living in or near poverty.

Voices in the Code: Citizen Participation for Better Algorithms

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay Voices in the Code, by David G. Robinson, is finally out. I had the opportunity to read the book prior to its publication, and I could not recommend it enough. David shows how, between 2004 and 2014 in the US, experts and citizens came together to build a new kidney transplant matching algorithm. David’s work is a breath of fresh air for the debate…

UK Uber drivers are taking its algorithm to court

A group of UK Uber drivers has launched a legal challenge against the company’s subsidiary in the Netherlands. The complaints relate to access to personal data and algorithmic accountability.

Uber drivers and Uber Eats couriers are being invited to join the challenge which targets Uber’s use of profiling and data-fuelled algorithms to manage gig workers in Europe. Platform workers involved in…