A Public Administration Route to Algorithmic Transparency I: The Anatomy of Administrative Law

This article is the first in a series of three essays by researcher and Senior Trustworthy AI Fellow at Mozilla, Amber Sinha. In it, he demonstrates that the domain of administrative law is uniquely suited to guide the defining of thresholds for meaningful algorithmic transparency, both in public and private law. He provides a brief overview of what makes administrative law suitable and highlights the principles of administrative law which render themselves appropriate for application in the domain of algorithmic transparency and accountability, and looks at how they may be applied to govern AI. The essay looks at the following questions in administrative law: Why is transparency sought; what needs to be transparent; when should it be made transparent; and who is the recipient of transparency.

The rich tradition of administrative law and the complex body of public administration that it governs provides useful questions with which to approach algorithmic transparency. As much as is made of the inherent opacity of AI, we often tend to approach its transparency obligations with a need to reinvent the wheel. Sinha argues that, to the contrary, we need to more stringently rely on the ways to approach transparency that have served us well. In the following two essays, Sinha shines light on clear principles of transparency in administrative law that can be applied directly to achieve algorithmic accountability, both in public and private sector use of AI.