Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

by Virginia Eubanks

Automated decision-making shatters the social safety net, criminalizes the poor, intensifies discrimination, and compromises our deepest national values. It reframes shared social decisions about who we are and who we want to be as systems engineering problems. And while the most sweeping digital decision-making tools are tested in what could be called “low rights environments” where there are few expectations of political accountability and transparency, systems first designed for the poor will eventually be used on everyone.

Poverty is denied by the media and political commentators, who portray the poor as a pathologically dependent minority dangerous to professional middle-class society. This is true from both conservative and liberal perspectives: voices from the Right tend to decry the poor as parasitic while voices from the Left paternalistically hand-wring about the poor’s inability to exert agency in their own lives.