Why should Nonprofits care about the Ethical Use of Algorithms?

Be it private or professional life, algorithms seem to be everywhere. There is definitely a ​growing pervasiveness of them in society. The increasing importance of algorithms calls for raised awareness reagarding the potential ethical implications of their use. In this month´s blogpost, we will take a closer lot at this topic.

Algorithms Everywhere!

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic acted as an accelerator for digitalization in terms of processes, services, or whole business models. Digital technologies are transforming the economy and are becoming ubiquitous. An increasingly widespread application of algorithms is decision-making in businesses, governments, or society as a whole. Algorithms might, for instance,  determine who is recruited and promoted, who is provided a loan or housing, who is offered insurance, or even which patients are seen by doctors. Algorithms have become important actors in organizational decision making, i.e. a field that has traditionally been exclusive to humans. As these decisions often have an ethical dimension, the delegation of roles and responsibilities within these decisions deserves scrutiny. This is where Coporate Responsibility comes into play ...

Luckily, as social nonprofit organizations work in the interest of the common good in one way or the other way, Corporate Responsibilty tends to be rooted in the "DNA" of nonprofits. At the same time, ​algorithms have also made their way into the sector of fundraising nonprofit organization as we had already highlighted in specific a blogpost from 2019. Compared to other contexts such as human resource management or the labour market (see for example this critical discussion of the algorithm used at the Austrian Labour Market agency "AMS"), the consequences of algorothmic decision making in the context of fundraising nonprofits will tend to be rather harmless. However, in the light of technological advances and the need for nonprofits acting as as active members of modern society that have a voice, NPO decision makers should be aware of the big picture in terms of "Ethical AI".

Implications and Challenges
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In the course of scrutinizing the ethics of algorithms, not only considering the algorithms themselves but also their actual implementation in software and platforms should be scrutinized. Two groups of concerns can be identified in terms of the ethical challenges implied by algorithms. there are epistemic concerns on the one hand when evidence provided by algorithms is inconclusive, inscrutable, or misguided. On the other hand, there are normative concerns related to unfair outcomes, transformative effects and traceability. These normative concerns have in common that they are related to the actions derived from algorithmic results. In a nutshell, the mentioned concerns can be summarized as follows:

leant against Mittelstadt, B. D., Allo, P., Taddeo, M., Wachter, S., & Floridi, L. (2016). The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate. Big Data & Society, page 4

So what? Three things nonprofit decision makers can do (at least)

• Make efforts and invest in explainable Machine Learning, i.e. make models that tend to be "black boxes" but provide predictive power more transparent and intelligible for stakeholders. Earlier this year, my colleague Carolina Pelegrin published a great introduction on explainable ML that can be found here.
• Be aware of general limitations of methods, particularly when it comes to "buzzy" topics like Artificial Intelligence. Have, for instance, a look at the "6 myhts regarding AI" in one or our blogposts from 2019 that can be accessed here.
• Keep on dealing with and discussing ethical AI. There are great resources around such as an AI Ethics Toolkit for Nonprofits by Nethope, a technology initiative and exchange platform driven by the world´s largest nonprofit organizations.

Any questions or input? Let´s keep in touch!
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We wish you a smooth start in a hopefully pleasant and successful fall of 2021.

All the best!
​Johannes
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