Algorithmic Determinism and Judicial Opacity
Aperture · 2024
"The delegation of critical societal judgments to proprietary, black-box algorithms creates a deterministic framework where human agency is subjugated by opaque, mathematically codified biases."
Algorithms have evolved from content curation tools into authoritative arbiters of human liberty and opportunity, now used in criminal justice, healthcare allocation, and hiring. The case of Eric Loomis illustrates the shift: he was sentenced partly on the output of a proprietary risk-assessment algorithm, COMPAS. Because the algorithm's inner workings are a corporate trade secret, neither the defendant nor the judge could examine how it concluded he was high-risk — a real erosion of due process.
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Panopticism: Power That Watches Without Being Seen
"Bentham's Panopticon — a prison where every inmate can be seen at any moment but can never tell whether anyone is looking — is, for Foucault, the diagram of modern power: visible and unverifiable surveillance that makes people discipline themselves, in schools, factories, hospitals and barracks as much as in prisons."