Once applied to risk assessment in the criminal justice system, are we deceiving ourselves on the wrong track?
This article questions the current undertakings of the ethical debate surrounding predictive risk assessment in the criminal justice system. In this context, the ethical debate currently revolves around how to engage in practices of predicting criminal behaviour through machine learning in ethical ways [1]; for example, how to reduce bias while maintaining accuracy. This is far from fundamentally questioning for which purpose we want to operationalise ML algorithms for; should we use them to predict criminal behaviour or rather to diagnose it, intervene on it and most importantly, to better understand it? Each approach comes with a different method for risk assessment; prediction with regression while diagnosis with causal inference [2]. I argue that, if the purpose of the criminal justice system is to treat crime rather than forecast it and to monitor the effects on crime of its own interventions — whether they increase or reduce crime — , then focusing our ethical debates on prediction is to deceive ourselves on the wrong track. Let us have a look at the present situation.https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607955/inspecting-algorithms-for-bias/Continue reading "The ethics of algorithmic fairness"
