[gmfawcett]

I write a faulty policy that harms people. I encode it as an algorithm, implement it as a program, and deploy it on a wide scale. Now it's automated and distributed, and it is harming people. Where is the fault --- in the program? in the algorithm? Or in the policy? Where do we fix the problem?

IMO, we are quick to blame inanimate constructs, when people and their policies are the source of fault. Vilifying "algorithms" only serves to distract from root causes.

[AlexandrB]

The argument I'm making is that when it comes to "human systems" like communities it's not possible to write a complete, consistent, and fair policy that can be unambiguously interpreted (i.e. by a computer). This is why Hacker News still has moderators and is not strictly governed by algorithms.

"Fairness" has always been heavily contextual, and the idea that it can be distilled to a matter of "if A and B then C" is folly. Even pure math can't reach the combination of completeness and consistency you assume is possible: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_the...

[__s]

Human judgement can't escape Gödel

[Chaebixi]

> Vilifying "algorithms" only serves to distract from root causes.

But that's the goal of some actors. They want to misdirect attention and responsibility away from themselves when their creations misbehave.

The root cause is no-one is really at the wheel once the algorithm goes into production to provide human discretion. For instance, pretty much the entire consumer facing apparatus of Google and Facebook consists of "algorithms" and there's no one empowered to call when they go wrong. Fixing that would cost money that the tech giants don't want to spend.

[PeterisP]

The point seems to be that is you limit your policy to something that can be reasonably be encoded as an algorithm and implemented as a program then you're by definition limited to write faulty policies that can't be flexible enough and will harm people.

I.e., that if you're choosing to use an algorithm for your policy, then this means that you will write harmful policies, and the choice to use an algorithm at all, any algorithm, is morally flawed and should be vilified - to motivate you and others to write policies that include appropriate flexibility, arbitration, human evaluation, overrides and thus can't be implemented as a scalable algorithm/program. Well, not unless we get superhuman general AI systems.