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by Svip 2486 days ago
You put a lot of trust in the people developing that algorithm. Do you get to vote for an algorithm replacement every four years?
2 comments

You vote for the legislators who hire the bureaucrats who define the algorithm that the engineers implement. Which is not much different from how it works now except there's a more manual process involving human judgement at various levels. You don't vote for the auditor working in the IRS.
The algorithm exists. Just because it’s not machine-executable doesn’t make it not an algorithm.
It's exercised by humans though, with gives _some_ accountability.

Try asking a computer in court what it was thinking when it ran the algorithm.

Why? The algo should obviously be public so if you went to court you'd question the algo or its impl, not the computer. After all, you only want restitution and correction of the issue, not punishment.
> The algo should obviously be public

Given that, at least in the US, people had to regularly sue corporations that defend the secrecy of their fancy algorithms^W^W Excel sheets as trade secrets... that's not as obvious as you might think.

Which is completely unrelated to public entities.
Why would that be? Health care providers, bail risk assessment software for courts, ... it's not like some public entity like the IRS would be likely to develop much in-house.