Voices in the Code: Algorithms, People, and Values

Today, we’re going to listen in on a panel discussion that took place at the end of last year, hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The Institute’s Research Director, Katy Glenn Bass, hosted a conversation with based on themes from the scholar David G. Robinson’s first book Voices in the Code. The book contains the story of how a group of patients, doctors, data scientists, and advocates worked together to develop a new way to match kidney donations for transplants, with the goal of making the process fair and open. The book bears insights on how algorithmic systems that are often heavily freighted with moral and political complexity can and should be developed with care to avoid excluding the voices of non-technical stakeholders in the outcome, and is a guide for policymakers concerned with questions around transparency, safety and equity in such systems. Panelists included Robinson, as well as scholars Deborah Raji and J. Nathan Matias.