Fair Enough? A map of the current limitations of the requirements to have fair algorithms

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the societal and technical challenges of defining and implementing fair algorithms, highlighting the gap between societal demands and practical realities in automated decision-making.

Contribution

It identifies the fundamental limitations of current fairness requirements and emphasizes the need for social context and choices to make fairness meaningful in practice.

Findings

Fairness is a complex, socially-embedded concept that cannot be fully captured by technical metrics.

There is a significant gap between societal fairness demands and their practical implementation.

Addressing fairness requires integrating social choices and context beyond technical solutions.

Abstract

In recent years, the increase in the usage and efficiency of Artificial Intelligence and, more in general, of Automated Decision-Making systems has brought with it an increasing and welcome awareness of the risks associated with such systems. One of such risks is that of perpetuating or even amplifying bias and unjust disparities present in the data from which many of these systems learn to adjust and optimise their decisions. This awareness has on the one hand encouraged several scientific communities to come up with more and more appropriate ways and methods to assess, quantify, and possibly mitigate such biases and disparities. On the other hand, it has prompted more and more layers of society, including policy makers, to call for fair algorithms. We believe that while many excellent and multidisciplinary research is currently being conducted, what is still fundamentally missing is the awareness that having fair algorithms is per se a nearly meaningless requirement that needs to be complemented with many additional social choices to become actionable. Namely, there is a hiatus between what the society is demanding from Automated Decision-Making systems, and what this demand actually means in real-world scenarios. In this work, we outline the key features of such a hiatus and pinpoint a set of crucial open points that we as a society must address in order to give a concrete meaning to the increasing demand of fairness in Automated Decision-Making systems.