Index Errans

person in Black box

Frank Pasquale

Algorithmic opacity

in Black box

Frank Pasquale, American legal scholar of algorithmic accountability and information and finance law. At the University of Maryland Carey School of Law around the time of The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press, 2015), later at Brooklyn Law School. He also wrote New Laws of Robotics (2020).

Stake§

Professional and ideological, openly so — the book is an argument for transparency regulation and against corporate algorithmic secrecy, an advocacy position rather than a neutral survey. No commercial interest.

Pasquale's contribution to this topic is to treat the black box as a question of power, not only of knowledge. He keeps the cybernetic sense of Ashby — inputs and outputs visible, the conversion hidden — but shifts the question from whether a system can be understood to who is permitted to understand it, across reputation scoring, search, and finance. His image is the one-way mirror, and opacity in his hands is a relation of power; the concrete legal remedy comes from Wachter, Mittelstadt and Russell.

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excerpts

The term 'black box' is a useful metaphor for doing so, given its own dual meaning. It can refer to a recording device, like the data-monitoring systems in planes, trains, and cars. Or it can mean a system whose workings are mysterious; we can observe its inputs and outputs, but we cannot tell how one becomes the other.
— The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (2015)

Pasquale's gloss on the term carries [[source:ashby-1956-introduction-to-cybernetics|Ashby's]] sense — observe the inputs and outputs, cannot tell how one becomes the other — and adds a second: the device that records everything. The book is about systems that are both at once, watching while unwatched.

on Black-box method, Algorithmic opacity

We do not live in a peaceable kingdom of private walled gardens; the contemporary world more closely resembles a one-way mirror. Important corporate actors have unprecedented knowledge of the minutiae of our daily lives, while we know little to nothing about how they use this knowledge to influence the important decisions that we—and they—make.
— The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (2015)

The asymmetry that makes opacity political: it is not that the algorithm is hard to understand in the abstract, but that its workings are kept secret by parties who see everything about us. [[concept:algorithmic-opacity|Opacity]] here is a relation of power, not only an epistemic problem.

on Algorithmic opacity

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