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Algorithmic impact assessments (AIA) are increasingly being proposed as a mechanism for algorithmic accountability. These assessments are seen as potentially useful for anticipating, avoiding, and mitigating the negative consequences of algorithmic decision-making systems (ADS). At the same time, what an AIA would entail remains under-specified. While promising, AIAs raise as many questions as they answer. Choices about the methods, scope, and purpose of impact assessments structure the possible governance outcomes. Decisions about what type of effects count as an impact, when impacts are assessed, whose interests are considered, who is invited to participate, who conducts the assessment, the public availability of the assessment, and what the outputs of the assessment might be all shape the forms of accountability that AIA proponents seek to encourage. These considerations remain open, and will determine whether and how AIAs can function as a viable governance mechanism in the broader algorithmic accountability toolkit, especially with regard to furthering the public interest. Because AlAs are still an incipient governance strategy, approaching them as social constructions that do not require a single or universal approach offers a chance to produce interventions that emerge from careful deliberation. 

Algorithmic impact assessments (AIAs) are an emergent form of accountability for entities that build and deploy automated decision-support systems. These are modeled after impact assessments in other domains. Our study of the history of impact assessments shows that "impacts" are an evaluative construct that enable institutions to identify and ameliorate harms experienced because of a policy decision or system. Every domain has different expectations and norms about what constitutes impacts and harms, how potential harms are rendered as the impacts of a particular undertaking, who is responsible for conducting that assessment, and who has the authority to act on the impact assessment to demand changes to that undertaking. By examining proposals for AIAs in relation to other domains, we find that there is a distinct risk of constructing algorithmic impacts as organizationally understandable metrics that are nonetheless inappropriately distant from the harms experienced by people, and which fall short of building the relationships required for effective accountability. To address this challenge of algorithmic accountability, and as impact assessments become a commonplace process for evaluating harms, the FAccT community should A) understand impacts as objects constructed for evaluative purposes, B) attempt to construct impacts as close as possible to actual harms, and C) recognize that accountability governance requires the input of various types of expertise and affected communities. We conclude with lessons for assembling cross-expertise consensus for the co-construction of impacts and to build robust accountability relationships.