Yes. Not literally of course, but it can be deleted/decommissioned, which is even more effective than temporary imprisonment (it's equivalent to death penalty but without the moral component obviously).
Why should it be obvious that the moral component is absent? Removing an algorithm is like reducing the set of choices available to society… roughly equivalent to a law or regulation, or worse, a destructive act of coercion. There are moral implications of laws even though laws are not human
The point of accountability is to deter harmful activity by ensuring actions/decisions somewhere result in consequences for who are responsible for them. Those consequences can be good or bad, though it is often used to refer to bad.
An algorithm has no concept of consequences (unless programmed to be aware of such), and the more plausibly whoever wrote it can deny knowledge of the resulting consequences, also the more whoever wrote it can avoid consequences/accountability themselves. After all, we can tell Soldiers or Clerks that ‘just following orders’ is no excuse. But computers don’t do anything but follow orders.
Most people/organizations/etc have strong incentives to be able to avoid negative consequences, regardless of their actions or the results of their actions.
Everyone around them has strong incentives to ensure negative consequences for actions with foreseeable negative outcomes are applied to them.
Sometimes, organizations and people will find a way for the consequences of their actions to be borne by other people that have no actual control or ability to change actions being performed (scapegoat). Accountability ideally should not refer to that situation, but sometimes is abused to mean that.
That tends to result in particularly nasty outcomes.
> The point of accountability is to deter harmful activity by ensuring actions/decisions somewhere result in consequences
What I read is yes, the point is revenge. If I can offer you a different way of preventing harmful activity, apparently you're not interested. There has to be some unpleasant consequences inflicted, you insist on it.
If algorithm can do some thing wrong, but nobody should be responsible for it, everyone will just hide their crimes under algorithm and replace it when someone find problem.
If a mechanical device does something wrong, are we in the same conundrum?
I don't see what the problem is. There's malice, there's negligence, and there's accident. We can figure out which it was, and act accordingly. Must we collapse these to a single situation with a single solution?
That's reasonable. Let's just call it root cause analysis in this case.
The original point seemed to me to be "we can't use computers because they're not accountable". I say, we can, because we can do fault analysis and fix what is wrong. I won't say "we can hold them accountable", to avoid the category error.
Yes. Not literally of course, but it can be deleted/decommissioned, which is even more effective than temporary imprisonment (it's equivalent to death penalty but without the moral component obviously).
Why should it be obvious that the moral component is absent? Removing an algorithm is like reducing the set of choices available to society… roughly equivalent to a law or regulation, or worse, a destructive act of coercion. There are moral implications of laws even though laws are not human
Is the point revenge or fixing the problem? Fixing the algorithm to never do that again is easy. Or is the point to instill fear?
The point of accountability is to deter harmful activity by ensuring actions/decisions somewhere result in consequences for who are responsible for them. Those consequences can be good or bad, though it is often used to refer to bad.
An algorithm has no concept of consequences (unless programmed to be aware of such), and the more plausibly whoever wrote it can deny knowledge of the resulting consequences, also the more whoever wrote it can avoid consequences/accountability themselves. After all, we can tell Soldiers or Clerks that ‘just following orders’ is no excuse. But computers don’t do anything but follow orders.
Most people/organizations/etc have strong incentives to be able to avoid negative consequences, regardless of their actions or the results of their actions.
Everyone around them has strong incentives to ensure negative consequences for actions with foreseeable negative outcomes are applied to them.
Sometimes, organizations and people will find a way for the consequences of their actions to be borne by other people that have no actual control or ability to change actions being performed (scapegoat). Accountability ideally should not refer to that situation, but sometimes is abused to mean that.
That tends to result in particularly nasty outcomes.
> The point of accountability is to deter harmful activity by ensuring actions/decisions somewhere result in consequences
What I read is yes, the point is revenge. If I can offer you a different way of preventing harmful activity, apparently you're not interested. There has to be some unpleasant consequences inflicted, you insist on it.
I think you should reconsider.
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If algorithm can do some thing wrong, but nobody should be responsible for it, everyone will just hide their crimes under algorithm and replace it when someone find problem.
If a mechanical device does something wrong, are we in the same conundrum?
I don't see what the problem is. There's malice, there's negligence, and there's accident. We can figure out which it was, and act accordingly. Must we collapse these to a single situation with a single solution?
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The point is that "accountability of an algorithm" is a category error.
That's reasonable. Let's just call it root cause analysis in this case.
The original point seemed to me to be "we can't use computers because they're not accountable". I say, we can, because we can do fault analysis and fix what is wrong. I won't say "we can hold them accountable", to avoid the category error.
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Interesting that you mention jail… the rule of law is kind of the ultimate accountability sink.