ABSTRACT
The workforce is digitizing. Leading consultancies estimate that algorithmic systems will replace forty-five percent of human-held jobs by 2030. This is a well-documented and alarming trend for the millions of truckers, bankers, and line-workers whose jobs will become obsolete. But now that corporations are using algorithms like employees, another public threat that has received far less attention is also arising: a growing corporate accountability gap.
One feature that algorithms share with the human employees they are replacing is their capacity to cause harm. Even today, algorithms discriminate against loan applicants, manipulate stock markets, collude over prices, and cause traffic deaths. Ordinarily, corporate employers would be responsible for these injuries, but the rules for assessing corporate liability arose at a time when only humans could act on behalf of corporations. Those rules apply awkwardly, if at all, to silicon. Some corporations have already discovered this legal loophole and are rapidly automating business functions to limit their own liability risk …
Diamantis, Mihailis, Algorithms as Employees: Holding Corporations Accountable for Their Digital Workforce (October 19, 2021).
First posted 2021-11-13 13:00:38
Leave a Reply