NYC wants a chief algorithm officer to counter bias, build transparency

Enlarge / The Brooklyn Bridge and lower Manhattan on November 4, 2019 in New York City. (credit: Gary Hershorn | Crobis | Getty Images)

It takes a lot of automation to make the nation's largest city run, but it's easy for that kind of automation to perpetuate existing problems and fall unevenly on the residents it's supposed to serve. So to mitigate the harms and ideally increase the benefits, New York City has created a high-level city government position essentially to manage algorithms.

Mayor Bill de Blasio created the job, formally titled the Algorithms Management and Policy Officer, with an executive order he signed last week. The person who ultimately holds the role will be responsible for, basically, ethics management, which entails developing guidelines and best practices to make the city's automated decision-makers make more equitable, fair, and transparent decisions.

The mayor's office announced the creation of the position following the publication of a report (PDF) by a city panel called the Automated Decision Systems Task Force, which spent about 18 months assessing the city's use of what it calls automated decision systems, or ADS.

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