A Public Administration Route to Algorithmic Transparency II: Thresholds for Transparency in the Public Sector
The use of algorithmic systems for public use comes with this own set of transparency expectations. The history of administrative decisions offers a rich body which can clearly inform the threshold of transparency for these decisions and how to apply them.
Overview
This article is the second in a series of three essays by researcher and Senior Trustworthy AI Fellow at Mozilla, Amber Sinha, about the domain of administrative law, and how it is uniquely suited to guide the defining of thresholds for meaningful algorithmic transparency, both in public and private law.
This essay examines two principles in administrative decision-making: the duty to give reasons, and relevancy as a criteria for decision-making, as instructive for approaching algorithmic transparency in public systems.
In it, Sinha makes the following recommendations:
1.) The principles of administrative law require that when algorithmic systems are involved in decision-making for discharge of public function, they need to be designed to satisfy the ensuing ends.
2.) The delegation of administrative discretion to algorithmic systems must be predicated on their ability to meet clearly defined transparency goals.
The transparency goals can be defined in terms of the algorithmic system’s duty to provide reasons.
3.) Where the technical nature of the algorithmic system poses fundamental interpretability challenges, it needs to be designed to flag sufficient information for independent human assessment to verify the machine’s inferences. Sufficient information may include the input data, the nature of the model in use, and the likely factors which informed the decision.
4.) The independent assessment of the algorithmic decision must ensure that the consideration on which it is based are relevant.
