Reframing "Accountability"
We often hear mention of “accountability” in tech, but it rarely comes with clarity about who is responsible when things go wrong or how it is upheld. In practice, industry often concentrates power and obscures responsibility. Alix talks with Nikhil Dey to reframe “accountability” in AI, centering ordinary people in demanding and using information about how AI systems affect them.
NIKHIL DEY - ACCOUNTABILITY
Nikhil Dey is a social activist and a founding member of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a workers and peasants empowerment organization. He has helped lead successful campaigns for landmark Indian legislation for the Right to Information and the Right to Work.
In this interview, Dey unpacks how people can demand accountability from power. Even as digital technologies are escalating impunity, those in power everywhere claim to value accountability. In such a situation, MKSS’s grassroots practice demonstrates the importance of demanding, publicizing and using information that power prefers to hide. Dey describes a social approach in which grassroots mobilization and public shaming go hand in hand with the careful design of laws and institutions, leading to major victories. The MKSS’s fight for rural workers’ wages against the opaque state apparatus has institutionalized India’s robust Right to Information law. And its recent work with gig workers has secured the opening of black box platform data. Though ordinary people may be in positions of weakness, Dey says, information can enable them to turn the tables on power.
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"If [accountability] is just an outsider giving an input or two, which seems to be happening in the world of AI, then you’re just being taken for a ride."