Contestable Black Boxes

The right to contest a decision with consequences on individuals or the society is a well-established democratic right. Despite this right also being explicitly included in GDPR in reference to automated decision-making, its study seems to have received much less attention in the AI literature compared, for example, to the right for explanation. This paper investigates the type of assurances that are needed in the contesting process when algorithmic black boxes are involved, opening new questions about the interplay of contestability and explainability. We argue that specialised complementary methodologies to evaluate automated decision-making in the case of a particular decision being contested need to be developed. Further, we propose a combination of well-established software engineering and rule-based approaches as a possible socio-technical solution to the issue of contestability, one of the new democratic challenges posed by the automation of decision making.This work has been partly supported by the project that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 739578 (RISE – Call: H2020-WIDESPREAD-01-2016-2017-TeamingPhase2) and the Republic of Cyprus through the Deputy Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy