UK Lords push bill to tame rogue algorithms in public sector The UK Parliament's second chamber is set to launch a bill designed to regulate the use of algorithms and automated decision-making by public bodies. There are currently no legal obligations on public authorities to be transparent about when and how they use algorithms to automate decision-making without human intervention or …
something I have the very distinct feeling that anything based on ML/LLM would intrinsically lack.
Promised transparency in government and in civil (public) service has never exactly thrown much light on anything let alone some of the more scandalous episodes.
Glasnost and Perestroika also are not greatly favoured in the West it would seem.
Isn't that already there? Under UK GDPR person has a right to know how decision has been made about them.
Seems like the policy makers think that if law enforcement is not keen on enforcing existing law, they need to double the amount of law and that somehow will change anything.
Under GDPR a UK citizen can ask what personal information is collected and stored and what it's used for. If the information is used to make a decision about, say, housing, tax, benefits, employment, etc. then they don't necessarily have automatic rights to know how or why the decision was made. I guess that, in theory, they could go to court if they are wealthy enough, but most of us can't afford legal redress.
I think you are both right. GDPR imposes a responsibility on organisations to notify data subjects whenever significant decisions are made about them using automated decision-making. This information should be provided either up front when personal data is collected or as soon as practicable afterwards. However, as you both suggest, compliance with this law in practice is often weak, and can only be made effective through subject access requests which, while free in themselves, can be time-consuming and may require expensive legal follow-up if problems are found.
There's an assumption in UK law that the machines are reliable - i.e. they do what they are intended to do - unless there is evidence to the contrary. This was the basis of most of the Horizon prosecutions and I think that the fact that the Post Office just stated that the Horizon system worked as intended was enough to prevent the defence digging any deeper. It sounds crap to me but IANAL.
https://davidallengreen.com/2023/09/computer-says-guilty-an-introduction-to-the-evidential-presumption-that-computers-are-operating-correctly/
I think that the fact that the Post Office just stated that the Horizon system worked as intended was enough to prevent the defence digging any deeper. It sounds crap to me but IANAL.
Several independent experts also said Horizon was fine IIRC.
The problem was that as employees of the company providing Horizon the independent witnesses weren't independent and appear to have (arguably knowingly) made factually inaccurate statements on behalf of their employer to cover up problems with Horizon to avoid damaging their employers relationship with the Post Office.
I think the danger here is treating the algorithm itself as legal entity. Algorithms are specced, designed, implemented and maintained by people and I'd like to see one person - someone high up in the organization, not some poor dev - on the hook for its performance. I sort of understand that once AI is brought into the equation then its performance isn't neccessarily quantifiable in the same way that a process-charted deterministic algorithm* is, but that's no reason for people to wash their hands of outcomes that have real impacts on people's lives. If I can be held responsible for my mad dog's behaviour when she's out in public then I don't see why the chief exec of my local council can't be held responsible for the council's automatic assessment of benefits, grass cutting, bus routes, etc.
* https://flowingdata.com/2009/08/28/total-eclipse-of-the-heart-flowchart/
*(not deterministic, but I think that there's a calculable** number of random run throughs would get probably get it right, although probability was never my strong subject.)
**Left to the reader.
> Too often in the UK we legislate when the damage has already been done. We need to be proactive, not reactive, when it comes to protecting citizens and their interactions with new technologies.
Been saying "nothing gets done until somebody dies" for years. Look at every single workplace law, almost all of them were in response to someone being killed or mutilated, not because it simply made sense. We haven't changed a bit in the last 200 years.
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