Fighting Back Algocracy: The need for new participatory approaches to technology assessment

Abstract

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 margi..