Introduction, Context, and Notions of Fairness

Topics

Survey of different concepts of fairness, equity, and justice.
Uses of algorithms and how they are used to make decisions.
Contexts under which decisions are judged (business, legal, social).
The art of measurement and the limits of quantification.
Decision making, power, and a brief history of race science.

Reading (Required)

Introduction

This article summarizes current status of AI Fairness within the context of business, arguing it’s not just an ethical issue, but also an issue of quality.

Harvard Business Review: AI Fairness Isn’t Just an Ethical Issue by Greg Satell and Yassmin Abdel-Magied

We will read a few chapters in the book Data Feminism, which argues for an broader awareness of surrounding sociological context when working with data.

Data Feminism (Introduction) by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein

What is fairness?

This article claims makes the argument that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with inequality, it’s absolute defencies in welfare that matter. This article should help understanding the next two. We will read more about this in later weeks.

People Don’t Actually Want Equality

This introduction to a book on equality and justice gives a rough overview of different notions of equality of opportunity.

The Demands of Equality: An Introduction

This entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is long and dense, but gives a feel for how philosophers think about these topics. Don’t worry if the text loses you a bit, but do be able to summarize the main point of each section.

Distributive Justice, Sections 1-4.

Reading (Optional)

A nice overview of bias in machine learning for an audience of computer scientists:

Kate Crawford: The Trouble with Bias (NeurIPS 2017)

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good resource to learn about philosophical concepts. Particularly useful entries for this course are:

Reading Response Questions

Answer the following questions and turn your writing on Canvas. Please consider the applicable Guidelines for Respectful Conversation when writing your responses, as the course staff and your peers (via peer-review) read your responses.

Pick one of the first two readings. Summarize a main point from that reading that you found interesting and its most convincing supporting argument/example. Also note any objections you may have to this main point or interesting subtleties to the point the author had to consider.
From the ‘Distributive Justice’ article: Explain the difference between Rawl’s two principles of justice (section 3) and the ‘luck egalitarian ideal’ (section 4), give a illustrative example of the difference, and write your opinion of which seems a more reasonable notion of justice.