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by advael
1729 days ago
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Sure, you're going to get some people gaming the metrics, (as happens with all metrics). Currently, by keeping the metrics opaque, Amazon (et al) prevents people from explicitly doing this, although it is using said metrics as a strong selection pressure on their employees, which has kind of a similar effect. But this misses the point entirely. Because these metrics and criteria are not transparent, the people affected by them have no recourse. There is no specific thing they can point to that is unreasonable about the standards by which they are judged, because there is nothing specific accessible to them at all. With no transparency, the "algorithm" could be some stupid nonsense, or something highly illegal, or something boring and human like managers playing favorites by up/downvoting employees on a secret app. The intention of this regulation is to shine a light on these practices, so that both the people affected and regulators can see how stupid and unethical they probably are - instead of speculating - and do specific things about it |
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There are a lot of things in society where you can gain an edge and/or profit by doing crime: either straight up stealing, or extorting/assault/bullying, or subtler things like playing into long-standing biases for your own benefit through hiring (say, for a sales force?) only the demographic that people most expect to see in positions of power, and refusing anyone who wouldn't fit that image on the behalf of your most prejudiced customers. They're all variations on crimes to the extent that they're coded into current law.
If you plausibly build these crimes into the algorithms in any way, you benefit from committing them while being able to pretend you're not doing it. Stands to reason that the law-makers are interested.
In the absence of regulation it's a race to see who can commit the most profitable crimes the most enthusiastically, with much hiring competition for whoever is the best at doing it. With regulation, it's more about competition for whoever is the best at HIDING it :)
If it wasn't somewhat (or very) adversarial by nature, we wouldn't need to have regulators in the first place… they're a natural part of a system that inherently tries to grow by any means necessary and can't regulate itself in any meaningful sense. Sounds like things are proceeding as they have to proceed.