A review by ifeustel
Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

5.0

Programmers, Public Health officials, social workers, lawmakers - if you have not read this book or engaged with this topic you are late to the party.

Beginning with an anecdote about a personal experience on the trails of accessing healthcare in today’s systems, Eubanks then walks the reader through three case studies of the relationship between technology and public services.

With engaging prose and analytical clarity, Eubanks draws a clear line between the history of surveillance technologies that we would consider commonplace in everyone’s lives and the trajectory of these technologies in the future, by examining how algorithms are currently being used to police the poor.

Eubanks’ well researched and engaging book makes the case for keeping the human element as an important part of our public services. Algorithms are not pure logic - they betray the biases and prejudices of their creators.

Do algorithms divert people from services that they need? Do they ask the right questions to include the whole population in decisions about allocating resources? Do they ask people to give up their privacy and agency unduly in exchange for public services? Do they protect people’s information?

All important questions which you can expect to examine in all their complexity from both angles in #Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks