Research in Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) has established many sources and forms of algorithmic harm, in domains as diverse as health care, finance, policing, and recommendations. Much work remains to be done to mitigate the serious harms of these systems, particularly those disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Despite these ongoing harms, new systems are being developed and deployed which threaten the perpetuation of the same harms and the creation of novel ones. In response, the FATE community has emphasized the importance of anticipating harms. Our work focuses on the anticipation of harms from increasingly agentic systems. Rather than providing a definition of agency as a binary property, we identify 4 key characteristics which, particularly in combination, tend to increase the agency of a given algorithmic system: underspecification, directness of impact, goal-directedness, and long-term planning. We also discuss important harms which arise from increasing agency -- notably, these include systemic and/or long-range impacts, often on marginalized stakeholders. We emphasize that recognizing agency of algorithmic systems does not absolve or shift the human responsibility for algorithmic harms. Rather, we use the term agency to highlight the increasingly evident fact that ML systems are not fully under human control. Our work explores increasingly agentic algorithmic systems in three parts. First, we explain the notion of an increase in agency for algorithmic systems in the context of diverse perspectives on agency across disciplines. Second, we argue for the need to anticipate harms from increasingly agentic systems. Third, we discuss important harms from increasingly agentic systems and ways forward for addressing them. We conclude by reflecting on implications of our work for anticipating algorithmic harms from emerging systems.
翻译:公平、问责、透明和道德(FATE)的研究在保健、金融、警务和建议等不同领域确立了多种逻辑伤害的来源和形式。我们还需要做许多工作,以减轻这些系统的严重伤害,特别是那些对边缘化社区影响过大的那些系统。尽管不断出现这些伤害,但正在开发和部署新的系统,这些系统威胁到同一伤害的永久存在和创造新颖的伤害。作为回应,FATE社区强调预测损害的重要性。我们的工作重点是预测日益增强的代理系统的伤害。我们的工作不是将机构定义为二元财产,而是确定4个关键特征,这些特征,特别是组合起来,往往会增加特定算法系统的机构的影响力:不够明确、影响直接、目标导向和长期规划。我们还讨论了由于机构不断增强,特别是包括系统系统和(或)长期影响,往往对边缘化的利益攸关方。我们强调,通过认识算法系统并不免除或转移人类对算法伤害的责任。相反,我们越来越多地在第二个机构里,我们越来越多地用一个日益明显的错误的概念来解释我们这个机构的工作,我们用一个越来越明显的方法来解释一个清晰的逻辑系统。我们用一个清晰的逻辑系统来解释。