Day: 13 December 2017
Where does Product Management sit in Government? Ponderings on ‘ownership’ & organisational design.
Some further reflections on the place of product management, building on Zoe’s post from a couple of months ago. This time the focus is on where product managers best sit organisationally – are they essential, digital, operational or policy people? The answer, of course, is that that’s not a terribly good question – not because it doesn’t matter, but because what matters doesn’t uniquely map to single organisational structures. Indeed, the question about where product managers (or, indeed, a number of other people) belong might better be asked as a question about whether the organisational structures of the last decade are optimal for the next. In the current way of doing things, the risk of losing strategic or policy intents feels like the one to be most concerned about – but, as so often, where you stand depends heavily on where you sit.
What we talk about when we talk about fair AI
Fionntán O’Donnell – BBC News Labs
This is an exceptionally good non-technical overview of fairness, accountability and transparency in AI. Each issue in turn is systematically disassembled and examined. It is particularly strong on accountability, bringing out clearly that it can only rest on human agency and social and legal context. ‘My algorithm made me do it’ has roughly the same moral and intellectual depth as ‘a big boy made me do it’.
I have one minor, but not unimportant, quibble about the section on fairness. The first item on the suggested checklist is ‘Does the system fit within the company’s ethics?’ That is altogether too narrow a formulation, both in principle and in practice. It’s wrong in practice because there is no particular reason to suppose that a company’s (or any other organisation’s) ethics can be relied on to impose any meaningful standards. But it’s also wrong in principle: the relevant scope of ethical standards is not the producers of an algorithm, but the much larger set of people who use it or have it applied to them.
But that’s a detail. Overall, the combination of clear thinking and practical application makes this well worth reading.