This post was initially written in French with Rodolphe Bigot (lecturer at the University of Picardie Jules Verne), in the Winter 2020, and follows a previous post entitled Rethinking responsibility and causality.
Historically, algorithms were content to provide decision support, leaving a human being to make the decision, but experiments are underway, with autonomous systems, making decisions, whether it be car driving systems, or predictive justice algorithms, as shown by Huss et al. (2018). This autonomy, which basically means the “ability to act freely” also refers to the idea of “governing oneself by one’s own laws“. But what is the responsibility of the decision maker in the case of a prediction that leads to harm?
Continue reading What responsibility for the algorithms?