GUEST BLOG / By John Frank Weaver, Esq., Contributor New America.
My family has grown very attached to our
Amazon Echo, particularly for music. We can access Prime Music by asking Alexa
for an artist, song, or station. Even my young kids can navigate the verbal
interface to request “Can’t Fight the Feeling” from the movie Trolls or the
soundtrack to the musical Hamilton.
As part of the smart speaker’s artificial intelligence, the
program picks up on our tastes and preferences, so when we simply say “Alexa,
play,” the device will queue up suggested tracks. In theory, what it picks
should have some obvious relationship to music we chose ourselves. And songs it
selects usually do. Usually.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Frank Weaver is an attorney in Boston who works on artificial
intelligence law. He is the author of “Robots Are People Too.”
But recently, Alexa considered our diet of kids’ music, show
tunes, the Beatles, the Rat Pack, and Pink Martini, and decided to cue up … Sir
Mix-a-Lot.
After we stopped laughing, I wanted desperately to ask,
“Alexa, why?” What in the name of Weird Al Yankovic was Alexa thinking when it
determined that we needed to listen to a one-hit wonder hip-hop artist from the
1990s?
Sadly, Alexa currently isn’t built to provide answers to
such pressing questions about its judgment. Scores of current and potential
autonomous devices and A.I.-powered programs—including personal A.I. assistants
like Alexa, self-driving cars, chatbots, and smart appliances that learn our
preferences—provide little to no transparency for their decisions, which are
made with no direct human control or input.
Whether through user error, poor design, profit-based
manufacturer decisions, or any number of factors, technology can make suspect
decisions. Remember how Google Home sometimes spouts ludicrous conspiracy
theories, or how Tay, Microsoft’s A.I.-enabled Twitter bot, learned abhorrent
racism in less than 24 hours?
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And as A.I. programs
and autonomous devices continue to expand into decisions that have more serious
consequences, including those affecting justice, health, well-being, and even
life and death, the stakes become much higher than an out-of-place rap tribute
to the backside.
Enter the right to an explanation, a movement to combat the
broad move to a “black box society”—a culture that largely accepts we have no
way to understand how technology makes many basic decision for us, like when
self-driving cars choose particular routes home or autonomous shopping
assistants generate your grocery lists. As you can probably guess, the right to
an explanation would require that autonomous devices and programs tell
consumers how the A.I. reached a decision: Why did you play that song? Why did
you get off the highway? Why are you burning my cookies?
This emerging right is another form of algorithmic
transparency, which seeks to ensure that algorithms consumers interact with do
not enable discrimination, exert hidden political pressures, and engage in
other unfair or illegal business practices. Many of those efforts are focused
on public policy. For example, the Federal Trade Commission’s Office of
Technology Research and Investigation conducts independent studies and provides
training and technical expertise to FTC consumer protection investigators and
attorneys related to algorithmic transparency. The right to an explanation is
focused on providing consumers with personalized, easy to understand
algorithmic transparency.
One of the most prominent moves in the direction of the
right to an explanation comes from the European Union. In 2016, the European
Parliament and the Council of the European Union adopted the General Data
Protection Regulation—a new data protection regime that promises to usher in
major changes to how companies handle the personal data they gather about
EU-based consumers. It’s a sprawling document—you have to get through 173
nonbinding perambulatory paragraphs before you even get to the regulation
itself. But once you do, you’ll find several new rules directly responding to
the question of how artificial intelligence technologies, like Amazon’s Alexa,
should be allowed to access and use personal data. Among the most noteworthy:
When companies collect personal data related to their consumers, they are
required to inform individuals whether “automated decision-making, including
profiling” is involved in processing that data and provide them with
“meaningful information about the logic involved” with that processing.
In other words, come the May 2018 deadline when the
regulations kick in, if you’re in the EU, A.I. owes you an explanation every
time it uses your personal data to choose a particular recommendation or
action. Forcing the A.I. to explain its decisions, advocates say, could provide
an important check on unintentional or unsavory algorithmic bias. It would put
consumers in a better position to evaluate and potentially correct these kinds
of decisions and prevent companies fearful of embarrassment or legal action
from allowing inappropriate bias in A.I. decisions. It would also give
consumers the opportunity to see how their personal data is used to generate
results.
Sounds great, right? But it’s not yet clear exactly what
would happen after I ask my Echo, “Alexa, why did you just play ‘Baby Got
Back’?” The General Data Protection Regulation does not provide any specific
format or content requirements, leaving experts in the field to make educated
guesses and recommendations. For example, Bryce Goodman from the Oxford
Internet Institute and Seth Flaxman from the University of Oxford suggest that
“any adequate explanation would, at a minimum, provide an account of how input
features relate to predictions, allowing one to answer questions such as: Is
the model more or less likely to recommend a loan if the applicant is a
minority? Which features play the largest role in prediction?”
Of course, the usefulness of any such disclosure depends on
the ability of the A.I. to appropriately analyze personal data and give the
consumer choices based on it. Some people think that cannot be done the way
businesses treat data now. John Havens, executive director of the IEEE Global
Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous
Systems, argues that consumers should be able to review their personal data and
how A.I. relies on it, functions that are anathema to how businesses buy and
sell data today. He also believes that you should be able to provide guidance
to A.I., correcting mistaken data and telling it which personal data is more
important than others.
So with a self-driving car, the right to an explanation
might look something like this: Upon purchase, the car would ask for basic user
information (home location, age, sex, etc.) and offer the user a menu of
options to prioritize: speed, scenery, preference for certain types of driving
(urban, highway), avoiding traffic, etc. Based on those responses, the car
would have a better idea of the personal data to rely on when making decisions
and could use the preset priorities to answer questions like, “Why did you get
off the highway an exit early?” During the lifetime of the car, the user could
review the personal data collected by the car and adjust the preset priorities.
In this way, the right to an explanation also functions as a
data protection tool much more powerful than rules currently on the books in
the United States, such as laws that require individuals to consent before a
third party can use or disclose their data and that require businesses to
notify users if their data may have been breached by hackers. Both ideas
affirmatively grant each person greater control of his or her data. But the
right to an explanation lets you see how the information you’re handing over is
used in context and can be used to grant you greater control of what you want
to input and how it’s processed.
The right to an explanation is not without tradeoffs. Thomas
Burri, an assistant professor of international and European law at the
University of St. Gallen, told me via Skype that though he believes there
should be something like these required disclosures, he’s concerned that the
requirements could go too far, hindering and infringing on the rights of
developers.
“If the first thing you need to consider when designing a
new program is the explanation, does that stifle innovation and development?”
he said. “Some decisions are hard to explain, even with full access to the
algorithm. Trade secrets and intellectual property could be at stake.” The fear
is that broad language creating the right to an explanation could discourage
companies, entrepreneurs, and developers from fully exploring the possibilities
of A.I. because they don’t want to reveal sensitive information or navigate the
complexities of complying with ambiguous requirements.
In the U.S., such broad language and potentially onerous
requirements—plus recent lack of concern for constituents’ personal data—make
it unlikely that Congress or state legislatures would adopt a similar right to
an explanation anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean we American users shouldn’t
lobby for it.
As A.I. and autonomous devices become more adept at
interpreting our personal data, and our reliance on those devices increases, it
becomes more important for every user to know what that personal data is and how
it’s being used. Policymakers can work with experts in the field to draft
balanced regulations that give companies enough room to innovate and give
consumers the kind of meaningful control that ensures they can’t use our
personal data in objectionable, dangerous, or discriminatory ways.
And it would also help explain how Sir Mix-a-Lot was cued up
for my family. Amazon, I understand Alexa doesn’t operate under the right to an
explanation, but call me if you have one.
This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among
Arizona State University, New America,
and Slate. Future Tense explores the
ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture.
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Source: https://www.newamerica.org/
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