Algorithmic regulation and the global default: Shifting norms in Internet technology

Abstract

<p>The world we inhabit is surrounded by ‘coded objects’ from credit cards to airplanes to telephones (Kitchin and Dodge 2011). Sadly the governance mechanisms of many of these technologies are only poorly understood, leading to the common premise that such technologies are ‘neutral’ (Brey 2005; Winner 1980), thereby obscuring normative and power-related consequences of their design (Bauman et al. 2014; Denardis 2012). In order to unpack supposedly neutral technologies, the following paper will try and foreground two of key questions around the technologies used on the global Internet: 1) how are content regulatory regimes governed and 2) how are the algorithms embedded in software governed? The following paper will explore these two aspects in turn, before drawing conclusions on understanding the normative frameworks embedded in technological systems.</p><p>Article first published online: 22 MARCH 2016</p>

What to account for when accounting for algorithms

“…Taking into account the iterative nature of software development, we may also question how the system has changed over time, why it changed, under what circumstances, and how extensive those changes were [36,43,110,136]. Most importantly, one should ask whether or not these changes require a revisit of earlier considerations about the ethics/accountability around the system [80].…”

“…What shape could consequences take in vertical accountability? Wagner [136] describes cases in which the automated output is subsequently redacted by humans, so as to comply with user/legal requests. Here he makes a distinction between the first order rules embedded in code, and the second order rules which are the manual changes to the output.…”

The combine will tell the truth: On precision agriculture and algorithmic rationality

“…One circulates largely within analytic philosophy, economics, and legal discourse: an evaluative or moral standard, prescriptively describing something as it ''ought'' to be, as in normative economics, or connoting the ''norms'' of a society (e.g. Warner, 2016).…”

The emperor is naked

“…The suffix '-washing' is used to denote a gap between the behaviour of a business or government and how that behaviour is framed or communicated to the public (Peukert and Kloker 2020). While greenwashing refers to the discrepancy between the claims companies make about the environmental impact of their products/services and their actual environmental impact (Voinea and Uszkai 2020), ethics washing denotes the proclaimed adherence to ethical standards by AI companies in order to escape regulation and to reassure customers and other stakeholders of their ethical commitment (Bietti 2020;Wagner 2016;Peukert and Kloker 2020;Rességuier and Rodrigues 2020). Besides in the creation of AI working groups meant to issue guidelines for ethical AI, ethics washing is also manifested in ethics partnerships for AI, such as in the employment by industry of in-house philosophers and ethicists with little or no influence on design processes or business operations (Bietti 2020), and also in the funding by Big Tech of academic work on responsible or ethical AI, which is really meant to obscure problems regarding business practices or the political implications of AI systems (Abdalla and Abdalla 2021;Ebell et al 2021).…”