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2 Jul, 6 tweets, 3 min read
There is a current bill to overhaul Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). While it was sold as being about "fairness"/"efficiency"/etc, the intention is to cut support for people with disabilities by $700 million. 1/

theguardian.com/australia-news… Asked in March whether the policy was aimed at finding effic
More up to date info on the current status of the bill and how to oppose it from @criprights 2/
People are using hashtag #RoboNDIS, in reference to RoboDebt, when the Australian govt automatically & unlawfully created debts for hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients (of money that they didn't actually owe), destroying many lives 3/

The proposed NDIS bill seems like another example of automation being used as a smokescreen for a policy change. 4/
The new assessment involves reducing questions about disability (which can be complex & nuanced) into a simple binary yes/no to be plugged into an automated system (with the intention of cutting care). 5/

theguardian.com/australia-news… Laurel Lambert reels off some of the questions: “‘Do you
I am also reminded of this chilling example from the USA of 6/

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Rachel Thomas Profile picture
1 Jul
With methods research, the dataset is secondary. This focus is misaligned with broader goals of studying risk assessments (eg COMPAS). A paper can be high quality in a pure AI/ML methods sense, but irrelevant for criminal justice impact or worse. 1/
from arxiv.org/abs/2106.05498 Firstly, we argue that the ...
"Placing data in subservience to optimization goals decontextualizes it – the objective is beating a measure of performance instead of gleaning new insights from the data." 2/ Secondly, placing the data ...
"Risk assessment in criminal justice is not a modular pipeline in which each component can be replaced with a fairer version the way you would replace a sorting algorithm with a more efficient implementation. It is a tangled mess drenched in an ongoing history of inequity." 3/ Secondly, placing the data ...
Read 5 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
5 May
Computerization does not result in the same organization "by different means" but changes what the org does

Automation is often justified in the name of efficiency, yet it can paradoxically lead to inefficiency: policy & admin complexity increase, surveillance accelerates @pwh67 Efficiency is a constant refrain and objective for automatio
A key dynamic arising from digital technology in government is differentiating the population into ever smaller segments, which risks reinforcing social divisions & inequality and disrupting procedural fairness. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… In the twentieth century, these ‘categorical’ differenceHenman (2005) outlines policy and ethical challenges of this
In the case of RoboDebt (algorithm that mistakenly overcalculated debt, with no human oversight or appeals), the algorithm was used to covertly redefine basic operations & procedures.

It was not just automation, but a change of government policy & principles. @pwh67 RoboDebt also removed government officials from checking de
Read 4 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
29 Apr
Saving Face: Investigating the Ethical Concerns of Facial Recognition Auditing, from AIES 2020, by @rajiinio @timnitGebru @mmitchell_ai @jovialjoy Joonseok Lee @cephaloponderer

🧵with some quotes, but I recommend reading the full paper: arxiv.org/abs/2001.00964 1/ Saving Face: Investigating the Ethical Concerns of Facial Re
External algorithmic audits only incentivize companies to address performance disparities on the tasks they were publicly audited for

Microsoft & Amazon addressed gender classification disparity after audit, but still had huge performance gap by skin color for age classification We found that this result holds not only for the audited com
Audits have to be deliberate so as not to normalize tasks that are inherently harmful to certain communities.

Gender classification has harmful effects in both incorrect AND correct classification. Promotes stereotypes and excludes trans & non-binary individuals. 3/ While it is important to strive for equal performance across
Read 6 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
28 Apr
Question: what are your favorite articles/papers/essays about the idea of external audits for algorithmic systems?
In "The Case for Digital Public Infrastructure", @EthanZ proposes building auditable & transparent search & discovery tools... for the emergence of a strategy that allows review & resists gaming

knightcolumbia.org/content/the-ca… One obvious, but difficult ...
Algorithmic audits will not produce accountability on their own; however if government creates meaningful regulatory oversight, algorithmic audits could become much more impactful

@AlexCEngler analysis on auditing employment algorithms for discrimination brookings.edu/research/audit…
Read 12 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
24 Mar
To rush CS students through simplified, condensed overviews of ethical understanding & position them to be the primary arbiter of change promotes engineers' inclination towards seeing themselves as solitary savior, to the detriment of the quality of the solution. 1/ Incidents of algorithmic mi...
Incidents of algorithmic misuse, unethical deployments, or harmful bias cannot be addressed by developing moral integrity at an individual level. The current issues are the result of collective failure. 2/

@rajiinio @morganklauss @amironesei Incidents of algorithmic mi...
Less about a single engineer’s efforts to enforce their understanding of diverse representation into the model, and more about a form of participatory design where other stakeholders are actively & humbly welcomed to join in creation of more just & equitable systems 3/ s. A step towards more incl...
Read 6 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
24 Feb
Big news: @jeremyphoward & I have moved to his home country of Australia (he is not a USA citizen & has been wanting to return for years). I’m excited about the move, although it is bittersweet 1/
The last year in the USA has been horrifying. I’m lucky in so many ways: we were able to isolate pretty strictly as a family of 3 (a privilege that many did not have) & our daughter thrived at home with us, although it was still hard to go for a year with... 2/
no in-person childcare; not seeing any of my friends; hearing regularly that mass preventable death is okay as long as it is mostly people with chronic illness (like me), the elderly, & BIPOC dying; and worry of not being able to access an ER or ICU 3/

Read 6 tweets

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