The Automated Administrative State

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Danielle Citron and Ryan Calo: “The administrative state has undergone radical change in recent decades. In the twentieth century, agencies in the United States generally relied on computers to assist human decision-makers. In the twenty-first century, computers are making agency decisions themselves. Automated systems are increasingly taking human beings out of the loop. Computers terminate Medicaid to cancer patients and deny food stamps to individuals. They identify parents believed to owe child support and initiate collection proceedings against them. Computers purge voters from the rolls and deem small businesses ineligible for federal contracts [1].

Automated systems built in the early 2000s eroded procedural safeguards at the heart of the administrative state. When government makes important decisions that affect our lives, liberty, and property, it owes us “due process”— understood as notice of, and a chance to object to, those decisions. Automated systems, however, frustrate these guarantees. Some systems like the “no-fly” list were designed and deployed in secret; others lacked record-keeping audit trails, making review of the law and facts supporting a system’s decisions impossible. Because programmers working at private contractors lacked training in the law, they distorted policy when translating it into code [2].

Some of us in the academy sounded the alarm as early as the 1990s, offering an array of mechanisms to ensure the accountability and transparency of automated administrative state [3]. Yet the same pathologies continue to plague government decision-making systems today. In some cases, these pathologies have deepened and extended. Agencies lean upon algorithms that turn our personal data into predictions, professing to reflect who we are and what we will do. The algorithms themselves increasingly rely upon techniques, such as deep learning, that are even less amenable to scrutiny than purely statistical models. Ideals of what the administrative law theorist Jerry Mashaw has called “bureaucratic justice” in the form of efficiency with a “human face” feel impossibly distant [4].

The trend toward more prevalent and less transparent automation in agency decision-making is deeply concerning. For a start, we have yet to address in any meaningful way the widening gap between the commitments of due process and the actual practices of contemporary agencies [5]. Nonetheless, agencies rush to automate (surely due to the influence and illusive promises of companies seeking lucrative contracts), trusting algorithms to tell us if criminals should receive probation, if public school teachers should be fired, or if severely disabled individuals should receive less than the maximum of state-funded nursing care [6]. Child welfare agencies conduct intrusive home inspections because some system, which no party to the interaction understands, has rated a poor mother as having a propensity for violence. The challenges of preserving due process in light of algorithmic decision-making is an area of renewed and active attention within academia, civil society, and even the courts [7].

Second, and routinely overlooked, we are applying the new affordances of artificial intelligence in precisely the wrong contexts…(More)”.

Rethink government with AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Helen Margetts and Cosmina Dorobantu at Nature: “People produce more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. Businesses are harnessing these riches using artificial intelligence (AI) to add trillions of dollars in value to goods and services each year. Amazon dispatches items it anticipates customers will buy to regional hubs before they are purchased. Thanks to the vast extractive might of Google and Facebook, every bakery and bicycle shop is the beneficiary of personalized targeted advertising.

But governments have been slow to apply AI to hone their policies and services. The reams of data that governments collect about citizens could, in theory, be used to tailor education to the needs of each child or to fit health care to the genetics and lifestyle of each patient. They could help to predict and prevent traffic deaths, street crime or the necessity of taking children into care. Huge costs of floods, disease outbreaks and financial crises could be alleviated using state-of-the-art modelling. All of these services could become cheaper and more effective.

This dream seems rather distant. Governments have long struggled with much simpler technologies. Flagship policies that rely on information technology (IT) regularly flounder. The Affordable Care Act of former US president Barack Obama nearly crumbled in 2013 when HealthCare.gov, the website enabling Americans to enrol in health insurance plans, kept crashing. Universal Credit, the biggest reform to the UK welfare state since the 1940s, is widely regarded as a disaster because of its failure to pay claimants properly. It has also wasted £837 million (US$1.1 billion) on developing one component of its digital system that was swiftly decommissioned. Canada’s Phoenix pay system, introduced in 2016 to overhaul the federal government’s payroll process, has remunerated 62% of employees incorrectly in each fiscal year since its launch. And My Health Record, Australia’s digital health-records system, saw more than 2.5 million people opt out by the end of January this year over privacy, security and efficacy concerns — roughly 1 in 10 of those who were eligible.

Such failures matter. Technological innovation is essential for the state to maintain its position of authority in a data-intensive world. The digital realm is where citizens live and work, shop and play, meet and fight. Prices for goods are increasingly set by software. Work is mediated through online platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo. Voters receive targeted information — and disinformation — through social media.

Thus the core tasks of governments, such as enforcing regulation, setting employment rights and ensuring fair elections require an understanding of data and algorithms. Here we highlight the main priorities, drawn from our experience of working with policymakers at The Alan Turing Institute in London….(More)”.

Innovation Meets Citizen Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Caroline Nickerson at SciStarter: “Citizen science has been around as long as science, but innovative approaches are opening doors to more and deeper forms of public participation.

Below, our editors spotlight a few projects that feature new approaches, novel research, or low-cost instruments. …

Colony B: Unravel the secrets of microscopic life! Colony B is a mobile gaming app developed at McGill University that enables you to contribute to research on microbes. Collect microbes and grow your colony in a fast-paced puzzle game that advances important scientific research.

AirCasting: AirCasting is an open-source, end-to-end solution for collecting, displaying, and sharing health and environmental data using your smartphone. The platform consists of wearable sensors, including a palm-sized air quality monitor called the AirBeam, that detect and report changes in your environment. (Android only.)

LingoBoingo: Getting computers to understand language requires large amounts of linguistic data and “correct” answers to language tasks (what researchers call “gold standard annotations”). Simply by playing language games online, you can help archive languages and create the linguistic data used by researchers to improve language technologies. These games are in English, French, and a new “multi-lingual” category.

TreeSnap: Help our nation’s trees and protect human health in the process. Invasive diseases and pests threaten the health of America’s forests. With the TreeSnap app, you can record the location and health of particular tree species–those unharmed by diseases that have wiped out other species. Scientists then use the collected information to locate candidates for genetic sequencing and breeding programs. Tag trees you find in your community, on your property, or out in the wild to help scientists understand forest health….(More)”.

This tech tells cities when floods are coming–and what they will destroy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Paynter at FastCompany: “Several years ago, one of the eventual founders of One Concern nearly died in a tragic flood. Today, the company specializes in using artificial intelligence to predict how natural disasters are unfolding in real time on a city-block-level basis, in order to help disaster responders save as many lives as possible….

To fix that, One Concern debuted Flood Concern in late 2018. It creates map-based visualizations of where water surges may hit hardest, up to five days ahead of an impending storm. For cities, that includes not just time-lapse breakdowns of how the water will rise, how fast it could move, and what direction it will be flowing, but also what structures will get swamped or washed away, and how differing mitigation efforts–from levy building to dam releases–will impact each scenario. It’s the winner of Fast Company’s 2019 World Changing Ideas Awards in the AI and Data category.

[Image: One Concern]

So far, Flood Concern has been retroactively tested against events like Hurricane Harvey to show that it could have predicted what areas would be most impacted well ahead of the storm. The company, which was founded in Silicon Valley in 2015, started with one of that region’s pressing threats: earthquakes. It’s since earned contracts with cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Cupertino, as well as private insurance companies….

One Concern’s first offering, dubbed Seismic Concern, takes existing information from satellite images and building permits to figure out what kind of ground structures are built on, and what might happen if they started shaking. If a big one hits, the program can extrapolate from the epicenter to suggest the likeliest places for destruction, and then adjust as more data from things like 911 calls and social media gets factored in….(More)”.


Platform Surveillance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Editorial by David Murakami Wood and Torin Monahan of Special Issue of Surveillance and Society: “This editorial introduces this special responsive issue on “platform surveillance.” We develop the term platform surveillance to account for the manifold and often insidious ways that digital platforms fundamentally transform social practices and relations, recasting them as surveillant exchanges whose coordination must be technologically mediated and therefore made exploitable as data. In the process, digital platforms become dominant social structures in their own right, subordinating other institutions, conjuring or sedimenting social divisions and inequalities, and setting the terms upon which individuals, organizations, and governments interact.

Emergent forms of platform capitalism portend new governmentalities, as they gradually draw existing institutions into alignment or harmonization with the logics of platform surveillance while also engendering subjectivities (e.g., the gig-economy worker) that support those logics. Because surveillance is essential to the operations of digital platforms, because it structures the forms of governance and capital that emerge, the field of surveillance studies is uniquely positioned to investigate and theorize these phenomena….(More)”.

Responsible Data Governance of Neuroscience Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by B. Tyr Fothergill et al: “Current discussions of the ethical aspects of big data are shaped by concerns regarding the social consequences of both the widespread adoption of machine learning and the ways in which biases in data can be replicated and perpetuated. We instead focus here on the ethical issues arising from the use of big data in international neuroscience collaborations.

Neuroscience innovation relies upon neuroinformatics, large-scale data collection and analysis enabled by novel and emergent technologies. Each step of this work involves aspects of ethics, ranging from concerns for adherence to informed consent or animal protection principles and issues of data re-use at the stage of data collection, to data protection and privacy during data processing and analysis, and issues of attribution and intellectual property at the data-sharing and publication stages.

Significant dilemmas and challenges with far-reaching implications are also inherent, including reconciling the ethical imperative for openness and validation with data protection compliance, and considering future innovation trajectories or the potential for misuse of research results. Furthermore, these issues are subject to local interpretations within different ethical cultures applying diverse legal systems emphasising different aspects. Neuroscience big data require a concerted approach to research across boundaries, wherein ethical aspects are integrated within a transparent, dialogical data governance process. We address this by developing the concept of ‘responsible data governance’, applying the principles of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) to the challenges presented by governance of neuroscience big data in the Human Brain Project (HBP)….(More)”.

Responsible data sharing in international health research: a systematic review of principles and norms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Shona Kalkman, Menno Mostert, Christoph Gerlinger, Johannes J. M. van Delden and Ghislaine J. M. W. van Thiel: ” Large-scale linkage of international clinical datasets could lead to unique insights into disease aetiology and facilitate treatment evaluation and drug development. Hereto, multi-stakeholder consortia are currently designing several disease-specific translational research platforms to enable international health data sharing. Despite the recent adoption of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the procedures for how to govern responsible data sharing in such projects are not at all spelled out yet. In search of a first, basic outline of an ethical governance framework, we set out to explore relevant ethical principles and norms…

We observed an abundance of principles and norms with considerable convergence at the aggregate level of four overarching themes: societal benefits and value; distribution of risks, benefits and burdens; respect for individuals and groups; and public trust and engagement. However, at the level of principles and norms we identified substantial variation in the phrasing and level of detail, the number and content of norms considered necessary to protect a principle, and the contextual approaches in which principles and norms are used....

While providing some helpful leads for further work on a coherent governance framework for data sharing, the current collection of principles and norms prompts important questions about how to streamline terminology regarding de-identification and how to harmonise the identified principles and norms into a coherent governance framework that promotes data sharing while securing public trust….(More)”

Opening Internet Monopolies to Competition with Data Sharing Mandates

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Policy Brief by Claudia Biancotti (PIIE) and Paolo Ciocca (Consob): “Over the past few years, it has become apparent that a small number of technology companies have assembled detailed datasets on the characteristics, preferences, and behavior of billions of individuals. This concentration of data is at the root of a worrying power imbalance between dominant internet firms and the rest of society, reflecting negatively on collective security, consumer rights, and competition. Introducing data sharing mandates, or requirements for market leaders to share user data with other firms and academia, would have a positive effect on competition. As data are a key input for artificial intelligence (AI), more widely available information would help spread the benefits of AI through the economy. On the other hand, data sharing could worsen existing risks to consumer privacy and collective security. Policymakers intending to implement a data sharing mandate should carefully evaluate this tradeoff….(More).

The Politics of Referendum Use in European Democracies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Saskia Hollander: “This book demonstrates that the generally assumed dichotomy between referendums and representative democracy does not do justice to the great diversity of referendum types and of how referendums are used in European democracies. Although in all referendums citizens vote directly on issues rather than letting their political representatives do this for them, some referendums are more direct than others.

Rather than reflecting the direct power of the People, most referendums in EU countries are held by, and serve the interests of, the political elites, most notably the executive. The book shows that these interests rarely match the justifications given in the public debate. Instead of being driven by the need to compensate for the deficiency of political parties, decision-makers use referendums primarily to protect the position of their party. In unravelling the strategic role played by national referendums in decision-making, this book makes an unconventional contribution to the debate on the impact of referendums on democracy….(More)”

Does increased ‘participation’ equal a new-found enthusiasm for democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Stephen King and Paige Nicol: “With a few months under our belts, 2019 looks unlikely to be the year of a great global turnaround for democracy. The decade of democratic ‘recession’ that Larry Diamond declared in 2015 has dragged on and deepened, and may now be teetering on the edge of becoming a full-blown depression. 

The start of each calendar year is marked by the release of annual indices, rankings, and reports on how democracy is faring around the world. 2018 reports from Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) highlighted precipitous declines in civil liberties in long-standing democracies as well as authoritarian states. Some groups, including migrants, women, ethnic and other minorities, opposition politicians, and journalists have been particularly affected by these setbacks. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the number of journalists murdered nearly doubled last year, while the number imprisoned remained above 250 for the third consecutive year. 

Yet, the EIU also found a considerable increase in political participation worldwide. Levels of participation (including voting, protesting, and running for elected office, among other dimensions) increased substantially enough last year to offset falling scores in the other four categories of the index. Based on the methodology used, the rise in political participation was significant enough to prevent a decline in the global overall score for democracy for the first time in three years.

Though this development could give cause for optimism we believe it could also raise new concerns. 

In Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Venezuela we see people who, through desperation and frustration, have taken to the streets – a form of participation which has been met with brutal crackdowns. Time has yet to tell what the ultimate outcome of these protests will be, but it is clear that governments with autocratic tendencies have more – and cheaper – tools to monitor, direct, control, and suppress participation than ever before. 

Elsewhere, we see a danger of people becoming dislocated and disenchanted with democracy, as their representatives fail to take meaningful action on the issues that matter to them. In the UK Parliament, as Brexit discussions have become increasingly polarised and fractured along party political and ideological lines, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt warned that there was a threat of social unrest if Parliament was seen to be frustrating the ‘will of the people.’ 

While we see enhanced participation as crucial to just and fair societies, it alone will not be the silver bullet that saves democracy. Whether this trend becomes a cause for hope or concern will depend on three factors: who is participating, what form does participation take, and how is participation received by those with power?…(More)”.