Algocracy

'Fighting Back Algocracy: The need for new participatory approaches to technology assessment' by Timothy Kariotis and Darakhshan J. Mir in PDC '20: Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020 - Participation(s) Otherwise vol 2 (2020)148–153 comments

City, municipal, and state governments around the globe are increasingly looking towards algorithmic solutions to long-standing and difficult problems in governance. We use the term algorithmic governance to capture this increasing use of predictive and other algorithms to provide efficiencies in the targeting of services and government processes. However, in the course of pursuing these efficiencies, openness, transparency, public accountability, and community-based deliberation, key pillars of democracy, come under threat when decision making is black-boxed in an algorithm. Furthermore, algorithmic governance (for example, in domains like welfare management) typically exacerbates the marginalization of the most disadvantaged in society, while simultaneously making such marginalization invisible to the larger citizenry. A hybrid technology assessment (TA) comprising of elements of both participatory TA (that involves public debate about technology) and constructive TA (that involves co-construction of technology between society and designers) employed through the framework of engineering technology for social justice, may help address these challenges.