Joshua Simons was a 2019 India-U.S. Fellow at New America. Simons, a Sheldon Fellow in Government at Harvard University, is writing about the politics and ethics of machine learning. His research argues that machine learning is political. When algorithms learn from data sets that encode structures of power, their decisions can, over time, reinforce persistent social inequalities on an unprecedented scale. This political character of machine learning, often obscured by its formal blindness and technical impartiality, suggests that as we make choices about how to integrate humanity’s most powerful decision-making tool, democratic accountability will be essential.
As a 2019 India-U.S. Fellow at New America, Simons will be exploring how technology policy should govern the relationship between democracy and machine learning. Simons’s project explores what legal and regulatory principles are required to ensure machine learning mitigates, rather than reinforces, social inequality in India. He is developing two case studies which trace the unintentional but significant discrimination against scheduled castes when machine learning is used to allocate welfare and credit. The aim is to understand how new technologies can be made to enhance, rather than erode, core democratic values in the world’s two most populous democracies.
Simons also works as an advisor and research scientist on artificial intelligence ethics at Facebook. He is looking at how many of the most significant debates about the role of technology in our public life, and the challenges Facebook has faced, are driven by machine learning. Before Harvard, Simons was a policy advisor for the Labour Party in the U.K. Parliament, working on technology and security policy, and for the Institute for Public Policy Research. Simons graduated from Cambridge University with a starred double first in politics.