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Ford School assistant professor Ben Green, and an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, says that if algorithms are to improve society, focusing only on whether they’re mathematically “fair” won’t get us there. So he’s proposed something new: substantive algorithmic fairness.
He presents the concept in an article in Philosophy & Technology titled “Escaping the Impossibility of Fairness: From Formal to Substantive Algorithmic Fairness,” and discusses it in a podcast with the Technology Ethics Center at the University of Notre Dame.