EU regulations on algorithmic decision-making and a “right to explanation”
Is my reading of this law correct? It sounds like it outlaws all use of algorithms to evaluate people. The right to explanation is just for the rare exceptions where a &quot;member state&quot; authorizes it. But the legalese is difficult to parse, and no one else seems to get this impression.<p>I think this is really bad. That&#x27;s the majority of uses of machine learning. It also has a lot of economic value to predict things like how likely someone is to pay back a loan, or even who is a spammer.<p>Most importantly, most these applications will go back to human judgement. And humans are <i>far worse</i>. Human predictions about candidates are really bad. We are incredibly biased by things like race, gender, and especially attractiveness. Unattractive people get twice the sentences of attractive people. Not to mention random stuff, like people being judged more harshly when the judge is hungry before lunch. They also rarely give explanations for their decisions, if they are even aware of the true reasons for them.<p>Going back to humans is a huge step backwards and will hurt a lot more people than it helps. I think the same regulations that apply to algorithms, should apply to humans. That would show the absurdity of these laws. But humans are algorithms after all. And particularly bad ones (for this purpose anyway.)