Lecture
SAILS Lunch Time Seminar: Rüya Koçer
- Date
- Monday 10 June 2024
- Time
- Location
- Online only
The unique dynamic nature of age as a sensitive characteristic in fairness analyses in AI-based decision-making systems
In recent years, a multitude of researchers have been deeply engaged in assessing the ethical dimensions of algorithmic fairness, transparency, and accountability. This study is an attempt to expose the inner workings of an algorithmic decision-making system in an empirically grounded simulation and show how age and gender bias function within the model. By referring to theoretical concepts of agency and accumulation of inequalities, we pose a thesis that when quantified by an algorithm, the ageing of an individual poses a risk of devaluation of actor’s agency and thus limiting chances for influencing one’s position against the algorithmic decision-making. In order to empirically demonstrate the theoretical arguments we use a generative social science approach. Two interrelated conclusions we attain are that
1. Age appears in AI-based decision systems as unique characteristic which is both dynamic and arbitrary. While people can ‘fight back’ against the adversity generated by other sensitive characteristics, age would still redefine the outcome of this struggle at crucial points in the life course. This is the dynamic impact of age that directly affects the meaning of human agency. On the other hand, while being a dynamic factor, age is also quite arbitrary: the way in which age categories are defined has serious implications: completely opposite outcomes may be generated by an algorithm on the basis of different categorizations of age, and this can happen without changing the overall performance of the algorithm. This is the potentially harmful arbitrariness embedded into the age as a sensitive characteristic.
2. Therefore classical understanding of human agency as being a correction force in the human life course (adults achieving success despite highly adverse childhood conditions) will need to be re-considered in the world, where agency is partially or entirely outsourced to non-human agents.
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