Automated eligibility systems and predictive analytics are best understood as political decision-making machines. They do not remove bias, they launder it, performing a high-tech sleight of hand that encourages us to perceive deeply political decisions as natural and inevitable. They reinforce some values: efficiency, cost savings, adherence to the rules. They obscure or displace others: self-determination, dignity, autonomy, mutual obligation, trust, due process, equity. They embody very particular ways of understanding the world, and foreclose more promising visions.
