Episode #47 - Eubanks on Automating Inequality

 In this episode I talk to Virginia Eubanks. Virginia is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of several books, including Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor and Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age. Her writing about technology and social justice has appeared in The American Prospect, The Nation, Harper’s and Wired. She has worked for two decades in community technology and economic justice movements. We talk about the history of poverty management in the US and how it is now being infiltrated and affected by tools for algorithmic governance.  You can download the episode here or listen below. You can also subscribe to the show on iTunes or Stitcher (the RSS feed is here). Show Notes0:00 - Introduction1:39 - The future is unevenly distributed but not in the way you might think7:05 - Virginia's personal encounter with the tools for automating inequality12:33 - Automated helplessness?14:11 - The history of poverty management: denial and moralisation22:40 - Technology doesn't disrupt our ideology of poverty; it amplifies it24:16 - The problem of poverty myths: it's not just something that happens to other people28:23 - The Indiana Case Study: Automating the system for claiming benefits33:15 - The problem of automated defaults in the Indiana Case37:32 - What happened in the end?41:38 - The L.A. Case Study: A "match.com" for the homeless45:40 - The Allegheny County Case Study: Managing At-Risk Children52:46 - Doing the right things but still getting it wrong?58:44 - The need to design an automated system that addresses institutional bias1:07:45 - The problem of technological solutions in search of a problem1:10:46 - The key features of the digital poorhouse  Relevant LinksVirginia's HomepageVirginia on TwitterAutomating Inequality'A Child Abuse Prediction Model Fails Poor Families' by Virginia in WiredThe Allegheny County Family Screening Tool (official webpage - includes a critical response to Virginia's Wired article)'Can an Algorithm Tell when Kids Are in Danger?' by Dan Hurley (generally positive story about the family screening tool in the New York Times).'A Response to Allegheny County DHS' by Virginia (a response to Allegheny County's defence of the family screening tool)Episode 41 with Reuben Binns on Fairness in Algorithmic Decision-MakingEpisode 19 with Andrew Ferguson about Predictive Policing   #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */ Subscribe to the newsletter