Contestable Black Boxes
This addresses the need for contestability in automated decision-making under regulations like GDPR, which is crucial for individuals and society but has been less studied than explainability.
The paper tackles the problem of contesting automated decisions made by algorithmic black-boxes, proposing a socio-technical solution using software engineering and rule-based approaches to address this democratic challenge.
The right to contest a decision with consequences on individuals or the society is a well-established democratic right. Despite this right also being explicitly included in GDPR in reference to automated decision-making, its study seems to have received much less attention in the AI literature compared, for example, to the right for explanation. This paper investigates the type of assurances that are needed in the contesting process when algorithmic black-boxes are involved, opening new questions about the interplay of contestability and explainability. We argue that specialised complementary methodologies to evaluate automated decision-making in the case of a particular decision being contested need to be developed. Further, we propose a combination of well-established software engineering and rule-based approaches as a possible socio-technical solution to the issue of contestability, one of the new democratic challenges posed by the automation of decision making.