Voices in the Code: A Story about People, Their Values, and the Algorithm They Made

By:

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis
Algorithms—rules written into software—shape key moments in our lives: from who gets hired or admitted to a top public school, to who should go to jail or receive scarce public benefits. Such decisions are both technical and moral. Today, the logic of high stakes software is rarely open to scrutiny, and central moral questions are often left for the technical experts to answer. Policymakers and scholars are seeking better ways to share the moral decisionmaking within high stakes software—exploring ideas like public participation, transparency, forecasting, and algorithmic audits. But there are few real examples of those techniques in use. In Voices in the Code, scholar David G. Robinson tells the story of how one community built a life-and-death algorithm in an inclusive, accountable way. Between 2004 and 2014, a diverse group of patients, surgeons, clinicians, data scientists, public officials and advocates collaborated and compromised to build a new kidney transplant matching algorithm—a system to offer donated kidneys to particular patients from the U.S. national waiting list. Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders, unpublished archives, and a wide scholarly literature, Robinson shows how this new Kidney Allocation System emerged and evolved over time, as participants gradually built a shared understanding both of what was possible, and of what would be fair. Robinson finds much to criticize, but also much to admire, in this story. It ultimately illustrates both the promise and the limits of participation, transparency, forecasting and auditing of high stakes software. The book’s final chapter draws out lessons for the broader struggle to build technology in a democratic and accountable way.
Copyright:
2022

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
212 Pages
ISBN-13:
9781610449144
Related ISBNs:
9780871547774
Publisher:
Russell Sage Foundation
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Russell Sage Foundation
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Computers and Internet, Social Studies, Medicine, Sociology
Grade Levels:
Eleventh grade
Reading Age:
16 and up
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

Reviews

No Rating Yet