The ADM Manifesto

Algorithmic decision making (ADM) is a fact of life today; it will be a much bigger fact of life tomorrow. It carries enormous dangers; it holds enormous promise. The fact that most ADM procedures are black boxes to the people affected by them is not a law of nature. It must end.

1. ADM is never neutral.
2. The creator of ADM is responsible for its results. ADM is created not only by its designer.
3. ADM has to be intelligible in order to be held accountable to democratic control.
4. Democratic societies have the duty to achieve intelligibility of ADM with a mix of technologies, regulation, and suitable oversight institutions.
5. We have to decide how much of our freedom we allow ADM to preempt.

We call the following process algorithmic decision making (ADM):

• design procedures to gather data,
• gather data,
• design algorithms to
  • analyse the data,
  • interpret the results of this analysis based on a human-defined interpretation model,
  • and to act automatically based on the interpretation as determined in a human-defined decision making model.

Read our mission statement.