The Kidney Transplant Algorithm's Surprising Lessons for Ethical A.I.

This article is adapted from Voices in the Code: A Story About People, Their Values, and the Algorithm They Made, out Sept. 8 from Russell Sage Foundation Press. In May 2021, I got a call I never expected. I was working on a book about A.I. ethics, focused on the algorithm that gives out kidneys to transplant patients in the United States. Darren Stewart--a data scientist from UNOS, the nonprofit that runs the kidney allocation process--was calling to get my take: How many decimal places should they include when calculating each patient's allocation score? The score is an incredibly important number, given it determines which patient will get first chance at each donated organ.