Measurement as governance in and for responsible AI

Understand

Measurement of social phenomena is everywhere, unavoidably, in sociotechnical systems.

• This is not (only) an academic point: Fairness-related harms emerge when there is a mismatch in the measurement process between the thing we purport to be measuring and the thing we actually measure.
• However, the measurement process -- where social, cultural, and political values are implicitly encoded in sociotechnical systems -- is almost always obscured.
• Furthermore, this obscured process is where important governance decisions are encoded: governance about which systems are fair, which individuals belong in which categories, and so on.