The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

"I really rate this book. It’s more technical, because Kearns and Roth are coming from the engineering perspective. They both work in computing and algorithmic design. They’re really good at communicating fairly complex stuff about algorithms—with lots of diagrams and examples, stories and graphs—to people who might be slightly frightened of that stuff. They’re really good at explaining it. They’ve also done some really good lectures that you can find on YouTube, which you can watch before plunging into the book. By now, a lot of people are familiar with concerns about bias in algorithms. Kearns and Roth are looking at how the exact details of the design of the algorithms might be understood to incorporate, for example, aspects of privacy, or aspects of fairness, and how there are tradeoffs between those. We can’t have it all, in a sense. There are technical mathematical details that they go into, really quite clearly and helpfully, explaining how there may be tradeoffs between different groups. They’re asking philosophers and people working in different fields: ‘Here’s what we can tell you about what the algorithms are doing, which notion of fairness do you like best in these particular circumstances?’ So in terms of being as transparent as possible about what’s going on in AI, and then helping to have a conversation with people who have got things to contribute from other disciplines, I think their book is just brilliant. Again, it’s not incredibly long. It’s fewer than 200 pages, and the pages are not that dense. It’s not so daunting that people coming from a non-mathematical, non-technical might think, ‘I couldn’t possibly read this.’ Many people could easily get a lot out of it because they’ve got plenty of clear examples. This book is a good example of real developments in the conversation. It’s not replacing the other books I recommended. It’s advancing the way we help people look at the technical details of what’s going on in algorithms and the challenge of fairness."