Algorithms. From google searches to g. P. S. Navigation algorithms are everywhere we dont really think too much about them but increasingly governments corporations and various institutions are using them to make decisions about us who gets Public Services who gets to nod how people are monitored and policed how insurance is challenged. I want to start here in australia where an algorithm used by the government has resulted in more than 400000 people being in debt to the countrys welfare System Center like its been called the road at scandal. Back in 2016 a decision was made to fully automate a key part of the astrology and welfare system the part where the earnings of low income people are compared with the amount of government money they received the government says they do this to ensure the right amount of Financial Assistance is being held at all the data matching algorithm officially called the on line compliance intervention had been in place since 2011 any discrepancies previously flagged by the system were investigated by a Government Employee 1st with automation all human checks were removed the government had instituted an algorithm that essentially said lets match 2 lots of data together and mash them to. Unsafe people have a dead cert some of the math was just bad just plain wrong like it was spread shapes the mashing the cells together in the cells to chop actual is a generalist who has been reporting on the road at story since it broke shes also an activist one of the chief organizes of the not why did ross Roots Campaign often people didnt realize that this was automatic in the 1st place and it wasnt until we started getting people talking together on social media on twitter that we realized. Actually its the government has found it was almost like a 100000 people have been gaslighted into thinking they had done the wrong thing that it was their fault and their outrage when they realised that there was a fault in the actual algorithm in the car and the Australian Government disagrees we are doing. What. We are. And we are recruiting money for our more chicks is a bit of an understatement the old system resulted in around 20000. 00 descript c notices a year but in the early days of the new Automated System that jumped 220008 week. More than a 1000000 letters have been sent out by the algorithm sometimes disputing government payments from this fall back a 7 years and what was even worse was the systems were imposed on paper with intellectual disabilities with homelessness with. Is a Chronic Health issues people who you know were barely literate or not literate all people who didnt know how to use a Computer People who were living in remote communities without access to internet people who just had no bloody clue how to deal with this sort of administrative bureaucratic. David begnaud was notified he correctly declared his income from a teaching job while he was on a disability pension back in 2011. Ready 4088. 00. Rather disease its going an accusation towards you that you dont have done the wrong thing unknowing head on want to details of your i dont want it and i was told i couldnt have that and the reason i was taught was that the computer looks at my post move and then sources a piece of information another person here another person in the business and they cant provide all that to me because it comes in too many places and it was simpler but in other words the older rhythm is inscrutable its totally normal even the stylists dont really understand it brogan can you tell me how much evidence or how much notification to send only provide you proving that there was a day when you mean anything other than this election and think that i have finally my text message. To say hi the money you our us is doing today. The fact that you couldnt get any concrete evidence about this is how we have calculated your days here is what you hear the hours you work. That really i found. It it sure any confidence that i had in the government will do the right thing the fact that i couldnt prove to me that i owed the money. Really concerned me so i mean im fine that youre seeing a letter in the mail thats generated by an ai that essentially says the government wants to let you know that we under paging by 5000. 00 or that you should have been eligible for the services that we didnt tell you death for were telling you now and we can back pay normally gets back had in fact youre only eligible for like back pay i think its 6 weeks government service. Says that the government can right by getting back for many many. Automation computerize ation algorithmic ties ation if thats even a word theyre always sold to us as such a positive thing all upside no downside as a stroll is department of Human Services put it computerized Decision Making can reduce red tape ensure decisions are consistent and create greater efficiencies for recipients and the department the problem is how the challenges system that has no effect no name and no besides the bottom of your letter say you know im in charge of this. Good afternoon welcome to the department of human sense like on a good day heated up sitting on hold for a couple hours to speak to a human the real question is how does it come about that the government has either pay people by billions. Because really. The criminal waste is occurring at the end of the governments line its the government thats doing this otherwise youre saying 100000. 00 citizens have made mistakes thats the case then the system is too difficult for people to negotiate so im not here shaking my fist at technology its not digitals fall its not computers fault this system has been you know designed you know quite explicitly you know by government governments responsible for its failures and governments are really responsible for the hell theyre putting all sorts of welfare recipients through unfairly by issuing them. This is something i heard from virtually everyone i spoke to about wrote it they said were not against technology its not like algorithms are all bad its the people and the institutions designing these codes we cant seem to trust and this really gets to the heart of our relationship with algorithms there are often complex hidden behind walls of secrecy with no way for those whose lives are actually impacted by them to probe them because theyve been kept off limits. Despite all the criticism and even a formal inquiry is trolling government stands by its algorithm and automation in the welfare system. We do have a compliant i mean. Why. We pick out 300000000. 00. Through that. There are at least 20 different laws in australia that explicitly enable algorithms to make decisions previously made by ministers will start we dont really know the full extent of how these are being applied but there are places around the world where the use of algorithms are even more widespread. Like here in the United States where algorithms are being used to make Big Decisions across everything from the criminal Justice SystemHealth Education and employment. And the United States has a longer history of algorithm use than many other countries Silicon Valley is a big reason for that of course but also theres much looser regulation here on how private companies and governments can collect and use data before theyre studying the effects of algorithms on American Society one thing is clear often its too poor marginalized to get the word steal. My money my way you know prochoice in new york state to me weve been ginning you think shes the authority on everything to do with the automated inequality is actually the title of one of the books the genius says americas poor and working class have long been subject to invasive surveillance and punitive policies she writes about prison like poor houses of the 19th century the bad conditions with thought to discourage undeserving poor from supposedly taking advantage of the system. What i see as being part of the digital poorhouse are things like automated Decision Making tools statistical models that make risk predictions about how people are going to behave in the future or algorithms that match people to resources and the reason i think of them as a digital poor house is because that the decision that we made an 820. 00 to build actual poorhouses was a decision that Public Service systems should 1st and foremost be moral thermometers that they should act to decide who is most deserving of receiving their basic human rights the genius studies into the automation of Public Services in the United States points to developments in the late sixtys and seventys along with the Civil Rights Movement came a push for welfare rights people are forced to live in the most human situations because of their poverty africanamericans and unmarried women who were previously bought from receiving public funds could now demand state support when they need to do. Well technology was touted as a way to distribute Financial Aid more efficiently it almost immediately began to serve as a tool to limit the number of people getting support so you have this moment in history where theres a recession and a backlash against social spending and social movement thats winning successes that and discriminatory treatment and there really is no way to close the roles they cant close the roles the way they had in the past which is just discriminating against people and thats the moment we see these tools start to be integrated into public assistance i think its really important to understand that history i think too often we think of the systems s. Just simple administrative upgrades sort of natural and inevitable but in fact there are systems that make really important conflict. Political decisions for us and they were from the beginning supposed to solve political problems among them the power and the solidarity of poor working people in the early 19 seventies close to 50 percent of those living below the poverty line in the United States receive some form of cash welfare from the government today its less than 10 percent in public assistance the assumption of many folks who have not had direct experience with these systems is that theyre set up to help you succeed they are not in fact set up to say help you succeed and theyre very complicated systems that are very diversionary that are needlessly complex and that are incredibly stigmatizing and emotionally very difficult so it shouldnt then surprise us that a tool that makes that system faster. More efficient and more Cost Effective furthers that purpose of diverting people from the resources that they that they need having algorithms make decisions such as who gets Financial Aid who owes money back to the government has caused concern among many different groups but whats causing a full on panic for some is the fact that algorithms are being used to actually make predictions about people one of the most controversial examples is the correctional offender management profiling for alternative sanctions its a bit of a mouthful but it sure is compass and its an algorithm thats been used in courtrooms across the country to assist judges during sentencing now of course algorithms caught way up arguments analyze evidence or assess remorse but what they are be used for is to produce something known as a Risk Assessment school to predict the likelihood of a defendant committing another crime in the future the school is then used by judges to help them determine who should be released and who should be detained pending trial. Now the judge has to consider a couple factors here theres Public Safety and flight risk on the one hand but then there are the real costs social and financial of the tension on the defendant on their family on the other now historically what happens is the judge looks into this defendants eyes and tries to say ok youre a high risk person or youre a low risk person i trust your i dont trust you now what algorithms are helping us to do is make those decisions better the compass algorithm was brought in to offset balance out inconsistency is in human judgment the assumption being of course that a piece of code would always be less biased and less susceptible to prejudice however compass is faced several criticisms primarily accusations of racial bias inaccuracy and lack of transparency in 2016 a man named eric loomis sentenced to 6 years in prison took his case to the wood sconce and state Supreme Court his allegation was that the use of compass violated his right to due process it made it impossible for him to appeal his sentence since the algorithm is a black box impenetrable unquestionable. Eric loomis didnt get very far the Supreme Court ruled the use of compass in his sentencing was legal the verdict tell about revealed the ways in which the ever increasing use of algorithms is being normalized the court had a funny argument saying that nobody knows where these decisions are coming from and so its its ok you know its not that the state has some particular advantage over the defendant but that everyone is that this sort of equal Playing Field and its not that theres an informational advantage for one side or the other to me i find that somewhat dissatisfied and i do think that in these high stakes decisions particular in the criminal Justice System we dont just want to have an equal Playing Field no one knows but i think we need to have an equal Playing Field of Everybody Knows we need to have this transparency built they didnt. System for the record equivalent the company that sells Compass Software has defended its algorithm it points to Research Commissions that the Company Meets industry standards for fantasy and accuracy whether compass most of the privately developed algorithms meet acceptable standards for transparency is another question even when they are used in the provision of Public Services algorithms are often closed to the public they cannot be scrutinized regardless of that sharon says that in certain cases he would still be comfortable being judged by a group bust algorithm so i do think its true that many of the people in the criminal Justice System are the most disadvantaged and the reality is they probably dont have a lot of say in their futures in their fates and how these algorithms are going to evaluate them. And whether this would happen if more powerful people are being judged by these algorithms i dont know now me personally i would rather be judged by a well designed algorithm a human in part because i believe the statistical. Methods for something risky in fact are better than humans in many situations and it can at least one as well designed eliminate a lot of these biases that that human Decision Makers often exhibit the United States has a massive Racial Discrimination problem and Public Services thats real so it is really understandable when agencies want to create tools that can help them keep an eye on frontline Decision Making in order to maybe identified discriminatory Decision Making and correct it the problem is that thats not actually the point at which discriminated discrimination is entering the system and this is one of my huge concerns about these kinds of systems is they tend to only understand discrimination as something bad. It is the result of an individual who is making every actual decision. And they dont these systems are not as good at identifying bias that is systemic and structural the promise of algorithms is that we can mitigate the by sees that human Decision Makers always have you know we always were always responding to the way somebody looks who is we somebody acts and even if we try as hard as we can and if we really have these good intentions of the try to just focus on what matters i think is exceptionally difficult now that again is the promise of algorithms the reality is much more complicated the reality is that algorithms are trained on past human decisions theyre built by fallible humans them selves in so theres still this possibility that that by sees creep into the development and application of these algorithms but certainly the promise is that we can least make the situation better than it currently is one of the things im really concerned about about these systems is that they seem to be part of a philosophy that increasingly sees human Decision Making as a black box and unknowable and computer Decision Making as transparent and accountable. And that to me is really frightening because of course computer Decision Making is not as objective and is not as unbiased as it seems at 1st glance we build bias into our technologies just like we build them into our right we teach our technologies to discriminate. But on the other hand peoples Decision Making is actually not that opaque we can ask people about why theyre making the decisions theyre making that can be part of their professional development and i think this idea that human Dec