IACAP 2018Algorithms and End User’s Responsibility

21 June 2018

Pak-Hang Wong is giving a talk on “Algorithms and End User’s Responsibility” at The International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP) 2018 annual meeting in Warsaw, Poland.

Our daily life is increasingly mediated—or, even structured—by algorithms with the aid of big data. Algorithms have certainly facilitated decision-making, but it is also increasingly acknowledged by the research community that these algorithms can be biased, and, in turn, could be harmful to individuals and the society. Acknowledging algorithms’ and big data’s harmful potential, researchers have explored various means to alleviate and/or eradicate the problems arise from algorithmic biases. However, the discussion about ethical challenges of algorithmic biases misses an important aspect, namely the moral responsibility of end-users (i.e. individual, not corporate, users of algorithms). In this talk, I argue that end-users of algorithms (e.g. users of a job portal) are morally responsible for the harmful outcome of an algorithm (e.g. discrimination on the job portal), and demonstrate why they are so. Drawing from the ethics of implicit bias, which has shown that whether one is morally responsible for the harms caused by implicit bias depends on their ethical-epistemic environment, I discuss the ethical lessons for both end-users and companies of algorithms to be learned from the ethics of implicit bias.

When: 21 June, 2018, session B, 8:30 am

IACAP 2018