Trust the Science But Do Your Research: A Comment on the Unfortunate Revival of the Progressive Case for the Administrative State

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Mark Tushnet: “…offers a critique of one Progressive argument for the administrative state, that it would base policies on what disinterested scientific inquiries showed would best advance the public good and flexibly respond to rapidly changing technological, economic, and social conditions. The critique draws on recent scholarship in the field of Science and Technology Studies, which argues that what counts as a scientific fact is the product of complex social, political, and other processes. The critique is deployed in an analysis of the responses of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Food and Drug Administration to some important aspects of the COVD crisis in 2020.

A summary of the overall argument is this: The COVID virus had characteristics that made it exceptionally difficult to develop policies that would significantly limit its spread until a vaccine was available, and some of those characteristics went directly to the claim that the administrative state could respond flexibly to rapidly changing conditions. But, and here is where the developing critique of claims about scientific expertise enters, the relevant administrative agencies were bureaucracies with scientific staff members, and what those bureaucracies regard as “the science” was shaped in part by bureaucratic and political considerations, and the parts that were so shaped were important components of the overall policy response.

Part II describes policy-relevant characteristics of knowledge about the COVID virus and explains why those characteristics made it quite difficult for more than a handful of democratic nations to adopt policies that would effectively limit its penetration of their populations. Part III begins with a short presentation of the aspects of the STS critique of claims about disinterested science that have some bearing on policy responses to the pandemic. It then provides an examination shaped by that critique of the structures of the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, showing how those structural features contributed to policy failures. Part IV concludes by sketching how the STS critique might inform efforts to reconstruct rather than deconstruct the administrative state, proposing the creation of Citizen Advisory Panels in science-based agencies…(More)”.

Machine learning and phone data can improve targeting of humanitarian aid

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Emily Aiken, Suzanne Bellue, Dean Karlan, Chris Udry & Joshua E. Blumenstock: “The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated many low- and middle-income countries, causing widespread food insecurity and a sharp decline in living standards. In response to this crisis, governments and humanitarian organizations worldwide have distributed social assistance to more than 1.5 billion people. Targeting is a central challenge in administering these programmes: it remains a difficult task to rapidly identify those with the greatest need given available data. Here we show that data from mobile phone networks can improve the targeting of humanitarian assistance. Our approach uses traditional survey data to train machine-learning algorithms to recognize patterns of poverty in mobile phone data; the trained algorithms can then prioritize aid to the poorest mobile subscribers. We evaluate this approach by studying a flagship emergency cash transfer program in Togo, which used these algorithms to disburse millions of US dollars worth of COVID-19 relief aid. Our analysis compares outcomes—including exclusion errors, total social welfare and measures of fairness—under different targeting regimes. Relative to the geographic targeting options considered by the Government of Togo, the machine-learning approach reduces errors of exclusion by 4–21%. Relative to methods requiring a comprehensive social registry (a hypothetical exercise; no such registry exists in Togo), the machine-learning approach increases exclusion errors by 9–35%. These results highlight the potential for new data sources to complement traditional methods for targeting humanitarian assistance, particularly in crisis settings in which traditional data are missing or out of date…(More)”.

Hiding Behind Machines: Artificial Agents May Help to Evade Punishment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Till Feier, Jan Gogoll & Matthias Uhl: “The transfer of tasks with sometimes far-reaching implications to autonomous systems raises a number of ethical questions. In addition to fundamental questions about the moral agency of these systems, behavioral issues arise. We investigate the empirically accessible question of whether the imposition of harm by an agent is systematically judged differently when the agent is artificial and not human. The results of a laboratory experiment suggest that decision-makers can actually avoid punishment more easily by delegating to machines than by delegating to other people. Our results imply that the availability of artificial agents could provide stronger incentives for decision-makers to delegate sensitive decisions…(More)”.

Transparency in a “Post-Fact” World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sabina Schnell: “What role can government transparency play in a democratic polity in a post-fact and a post-truth world? If the problem is not that citizens lack information about what the government does, but that they filter existing information through pre-existing ideological biases and world views, can government transparency still contribute to better informed citizens and more accountable government? To answer these questions, the article first reviews the critiques of transparency that are particularly salient in a post-fact world: that it reduces trust in government and increases polarization in deliberation. It then discusses three possible solutions: less transparency, tailored transparency, and reasoned transparency. Drawing on deliberative democracy theory, the article concludes that to reclaim the value of transparency, public administration scholars and practitioners need to move from a narrow interpretation of transparency as access to information to a broader, more holistic one, that considers more explicitly the communicative aspects of transparency and its normative foundations….(More)”.

Humans in the Loop

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Rebecca Crootof, Margot E. Kaminski and W. Nicholson Price II: “From lethal drones to cancer diagnostics, complex and artificially intelligent algorithms are increasingly integrated into decisionmaking that affects human lives, raising challenging questions about the proper allocation of decisional authority between humans and machines. Regulators commonly respond to these concerns by putting a “human in the loop”: using law to require or encourage including an individual within an algorithmic decisionmaking process.

Drawing on our distinctive areas of expertise with algorithmic systems, we take a bird’s eye view to make three generalizable contributions to the discourse. First, contrary to the popular narrative, the law is already profoundly (and problematically) involved in governing algorithmic systems. Law may explicitly require or prohibit human involvement and law may indirectly encourage or discourage human involvement, all without regard to what we know about the strengths and weaknesses of human and algorithmic decisionmakers and the particular quirks of hybrid human-machine systems. Second, we identify “the MABA-MABA trap,” wherein regulators are tempted to address a panoply of concerns by “slapping a human in it” based on presumptions about what humans and algorithms are respectively better at doing, often without realizing that the new hybrid system needs its own distinct regulatory interventions. Instead, we suggest that regulators should focus on what they want the human to do—what role the human is meant to play—and design regulations to allow humans to play these roles successfully. Third, borrowing concepts from systems engineering and existing law regulating railroads, nuclear reactors, and medical devices, we highlight lessons for regulating humans in the loop as well as alternative means of regulating human-machine systems going forward….(More)”.

Valuing Financial Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Maryam Farboodi, Dhruv Singal, Laura Veldkamp & Venky Venkateswaran: “How should an investor value financial data? The answer is complicated because it depends on the characteristics of all investors. We develop a sufficient statistics approach that uses equilibrium asset return moments to summarize all relevant information about others’ characteristics. It can value data that is public or private, about one or many assets, relevant for dividends or for sentiment. While different data types have different valuations, heterogeneous investors value the same data very differently, which suggests a low price elasticity for data demand. Heterogeneous investors’ data valuations are also affected very differentially by market illiquidity…(More)”.

The ethical imperative to identify and address data and intelligence asymmetries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan Verhulst in AI & Society: “The insight that knowledge, resulting from having access to (privileged) information or data, is power is more relevant today than ever before. The data age has redefined the very notion of knowledge and information (as well as power), leading to a greater reliance on dispersed and decentralized datasets as well as to new forms of innovation and learning, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). As Thomas Piketty (among others) has shown, we live in an increasingly stratified world, and our society’s socio-economic asymmetries are often grafted onto data and information asymmetries. As we have documented elsewhere, data access is fundamentally linked to economic opportunity, improved governance, better science and citizen empowerment. The need to address data and information asymmetries—and their resulting inequalities of political and economic power—is therefore emerging as among the most urgent ethical challenges of our era, yet often not recognized as such.

Even as awareness grows of this imperative, society and policymakers lag in their understanding of the underlying issue. Just what are data asymmetries? How do they emerge, and what form do they take? And how do data asymmetries accelerate information and other asymmetries? What forces and power structures perpetuate or deepen these asymmetries, and vice versa? I argue that it is a mistake to treat this problem as homogenous. In what follows, I suggest the beginning of a taxonomy of asymmetries. Although closely related, each one emerges from a different set of contingencies, and each is likely to require different policy remedies. The focus of this short essay is to start outlining these different types of asymmetries. Further research could deepen and expand the proposed taxonomy as well help define solutions that are contextually appropriate and fit for purpose….(More)”.

Data Types, Data Doubts & Data Trusts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by João Marinotti: “Data is not monolithic. Nonetheless, the word is frequently used indiscriminately, referring to a large number of different concepts. It may refer to information writ large, or specifically to personally identifiable information, discrete digital files, trade secrets, and even to sets of AI-generated content. Yet each of these types of “data” require different governance regimes in commerce, in life, and in law. Despite this diversity, the singular concept of data trusts is promulgated as a solution to our collective data governance problems. Data trusts—meant to cover all of these types of data—are said to promote personal privacy, increase corporate transparency, facilitate the sharing of data, and even pave the way for the next generation of artificial intelligence. These anticipated benefits, however, require the body and flexibility of equitable trust law and its inherent fiduciary relationships. Unfortunately, American trust law does not allow for the existence of such general data trusts. If anything, the judicial, academic, and legislative confusion regarding data rights—or its status as property—demonstrates that discussions of data trusts may be ignoring a key element. Without first determining whether (or what kind of) data can be recognized as a trust res (i.e., as trust property) under existing law, it may be premature to accept data trusts as the private law solution to our data governance ills. If, on the other hand, the implementation of data trusts requires legislative intervention, its purported benefits must be analyzed in contrast to the myriad other new and evolving data governance frameworks that would similarly require legislation. By analyzing existing trust law and the difficulties of defining data rights, this essay highlights the urgent need to pursue doctrinally, legislatively, and technologically viable data governance strategies….(More)”.

Digitisation and Sovereignty in Humanitarian Space: Technologies, Territories and Tensions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Aaron Martin: “Debates are ongoing on the limits of – and possibilities for – sovereignty in the digital era. While most observers spotlight the implications of the Internet, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence/machine learning and advanced data analytics for the sovereignty of nation states, a critical yet under-examined question concerns what digital innovations mean for authority, power and control in the humanitarian sphere in which different rules, values and expectations are thought to apply. This forum brings together practitioners and scholars to explore both conceptually and empirically how digitisation and datafication in aid are (re)shaping notions of sovereign power in humanitarian space. The forum’s contributors challenge established understandings of sovereignty in new forms of digital humanitarian action. Among other focus areas, the forum draws attention to how cyber dependencies threaten international humanitarian organisations’ purported digital sovereignty. It also contests the potential of technologies like blockchain to revolutionise notions of sovereignty in humanitarian assistance and hypothesises about the ineluctable parasitic qualities of humanitarian technology. The forum concludes by proposing that digital technologies deployed in migration contexts might be understood as ‘sovereignty experiments’. We invite readers from scholarly, policy and practitioner communities alike to engage closely with these critical perspectives on digitisation and sovereignty in humanitarian space….(More)”.

The Role and Impact of the Right of Petition as an Instrument of Participatory Democracy in the European Union

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alberto Alemanno: “Petitioning represents the oldest, most accessible, permanent and general-purpose participatory mechanism for any individual who intends to enter into contact with the EU institutional apparatus. As such, the right to petition provides EU citizens and residents with a simple means of contacting the European institutions with complaints or requests for action in relation to “orphan” or “dormant” issues that fail to get the attention and action of other European Parliament committees or EU institutions, in particular concerning problems related to the application of EU law at the national and local level. The right to petition plays different and complementary functions, from administrative and political oversight over the EU Commission and the Member States to legislative agenda-setting, while offering a unique mechanism of representation for individuals and minorities – such as non-EU citizens, migrants and minors – who currently lack such representation. There are, however, still some major structural issues over effectively ensuring the exercise of the right to petition and the full realisation of its multiple democratic functions within the current EU participatory infrastructure. It does so at time the EU undergoes a major democratic exercise – the Conference on the Future of Europe – that, for the first time since 2007, may lead to institutional reform and put to test democratic innovations, such as citizens’ assemblies at the transnational level. Against this background, this study identifies and systematises the EU petition system’s major flaws – focusing on its design, accountability and actual practice – in order to provide a set of recommendations on how to strengthen the role and impact of the right of petition as the privileged instrument of EU participatory democracy…(More)”.