- Limiting Parole: A new law pushed by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry cedes much of the power of the parole board to an algorithm that prevents thousands of prisoners from early release.
- Immutable Risk Score: The risk assessment tool, TIGER, does not take into account efforts prisoners make to rehabilitate themselves. Instead, it focuses on factors that cannot be changed.
- Racial Bias: Civil rights attorneys say the new law could disproportionately harm Black people in part because the algorithm measures factors where racial disparities already exist.
The people responsible for this imbecile sloughing off of responsibility need to be held to account. The stakes are too high to permit them to claim that “the brain warden got it wrong, but it’s out of our hands”, these are the types of situations that warrant standing directly in front of someone and forcing them justify the damage they’ve caused, and explain how they’re going to rectify their fuck up and compensate the affected parties. What I’m hearing is alarmingly similar to news about current problems with medical insurance and the labour market.
Our age will eventually (assuming our species survives) be known as the age of responsibility diffusion. Companies, bureaucracies, AI, they are all just different mechanisms to achieve the same thing, detach the people from any sense of responsibility for the outcome of their horrible choices.
If the responsibility is being shelled out to “the algorithm”, then doesn’t that mean they have less responsibility? Shouldn’t they be paid less if they have less responsibility?
Something tells me they won’t see the logic in that though.
“If you don’t pay me the big bucks for my experience and expertise, who else will tell the robot how to destroy your life?”