Precarity: Modeling the Long Term Effects of Compounded Decisions on Individual Instability

The study of the social impact of automated decision making has focused largely on issues of fairness at the point of decision, evaluating the fairness (with respect to a population) of a sequence or pipeline of decisions, or examining the dynamics of a game between the decision-maker and the decision subject. What is missing from this study is an examination of precarity: a term coined by Judith Butler to describe an unstable state of existence in which negative decisions can have ripple effects on one's well-being. Such ripple effects are not captured by changes in income or wealth alone or by one decision alone. To study precarity, we must reorient our frame of reference away from the decision-maker and towards the decision subject; away from aggregates of decisions over a population and towards aggregates of decisions (for an individual) over time. An individual who lives with higher precarity is more affected and less able to recover by the same negative decision than another with low precarity. Thus including only the direct impact of a single decision or a few decisions is insufficient to judge if that system was fair. However, precarity is not an attribute of an individual; it is a result of being subject to greater risks and fewer supports, in addition to starting off at a less secure position. Precarity is impacted by racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, and other systems of oppression, and an individual's intersectional identity may put one at greater risk in society, subject to a lower income for the same job, less able to build wealth even at the same income level, and less able to recover from harm.