Approaching the human in the loop – legal perspectives on hybrid human/algorithmic decision-making in three contexts

TLDR

Public and private organizations increasingly implement algorithmic decision‑making systems, and legal and practical incentives require humans to remain in the loop to preserve agency, accountability, safeguards, and quality control. The paper illustrates legal dependencies that drive hybrid decision‑making in policing, social welfare, and online moderation, and calls for situating such systems within broader legal frameworks while adopting socio‑technical research. Hybrid decision‑making is defined as semi‑automated systems where algorithmic and human agents interact, and the authors build on prior work to map legal dependencies across the three contexts.

Abstract

Public and private organizations are increasingly implementing various algorithmic decision-making systems. Through legal and practical incentives, humans will often need to be kept in the loop of such decision-making to maintain human agency and accountability, provide legal safeguards, or perform quality control. Introducing such human oversight results in various forms of semi-automated, or hybrid decision-making – where algorithmic and human agents interact. Building on previous research we illustrate the legal dependencies forming an impetus for hybrid decision-making in the policing, social welfare, and online moderation contexts. We highlight the further need to situate hybrid decision-making in a wider legal environment of data protection, constitutional and administrative legal principles, as well as the need for contextual analysis of such principles. Finally, we outline a research agenda to capture contextual legal dependencies of hybrid decision-making, pointing to the need to go beyond legal doctrinal studies by adopting socio-technical perspectives and empirical studies.