Reply to post: Plase stop using the word algorithms

Regulate This! Time to subject algorithms to our laws

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Plase stop using the word algorithms

To someone who actually develops algorithms for a living, your use of the word as a short-hand for "using a computer as a legal or PR fig-leaf" really grates.

Algorithms are intellectual constructs and their form is constrained (if not determined, in simple cases) by what they are intended to do. Calling for algorithms to be regulated makes about as much sense as calling for mathematical theorems to be regulated.

You can regulate whether people can *use* particular algorithms for particular purposes, but I think you'll find that hard to regulate in the case where someone chooses to run the algorithm on neurons rather than silicon. (Societies that try to regulate what goes on inside someone's head have a Bad Track Record, historically.)

If I'm reading you correctly, your gripe is not the algorithm, nor even the fact that it is running on a computer, but simply the fact that the people who choose to run those algorithms on the computer are using the computer to put themselves at arm's length from the legal consequences of the algorithm delivering an anti-social or illegal answer.

Happily, I believe that even in this case there is ample legal machinery and precedent already in place. If a corporation directs an employee to perform an algorithm and that employee ends up breaking some law, the corporation carries the can. Directors are liable, etc. This system has been tested on several generations of corporate shysters and crooks and appears to work. Using a computer rather than an employee merely increases the calibre of the cannon directed at the corporation's feet.

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