Ethical algorithm design

Abstract

In this letter, we summarize the research agenda that we survey in our recent book The Ethical Algorithm, which is intended for a general, nontechnical audience. At a high level, this research agenda proposes formalizing the ethical and social values that we want our algorithms to maintain --- values including privacy, fairness, and explainability --- and then to embed these social values directly into our algorithms as part of their design. This broad research area is most mature in the area of privacy, specifically differential privacy. It is off to a good start in emerging areas like algorithmic fairness, and seems promising for more nebulous goals like explainability, if only we can find the right definitions. Most work in this area to date analyzes algorithms as isolated components, but game-theoretic and economic analysis will become increasingly important as we try and study the effects of algorithmic interventions in larger sociotechnical systems.