Systems designers must understand how technology has shaped the lives of people and whole societies in the past. But Automating Inequality is a testament to the fact that intentions are not enough. This porous border between policing and assisting those without a home criminalizes poverty.įinally, the Allegheny County case study illustrates that automation in governance makes the poor into second class citizens living in a totalitarian state with few rights: “The professional middle class would never tolerate the AFST evaluating their parenting. Eubanks takes pains to show that, in some cases, damaging systems are designed by good people with the best of intentions. This is a recipe for law enforcement fishing expeditions” (180). For instance, information about the unhoused is kept for seven years, “and the Los Angeles Police Department can access it without a warrant.

The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in. The Los Angeles case study demonstrates that automated systems create a surveillance state around poverty by indiscriminately collecting, storing, and sharing data. In Automating Inequality, Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The Indiana system perpetuates “a moral narrative that criminalizes most of the poor while providing life-saving resources to a lucky handful” (180). The Daniels administration’s hostility to the poor was indiscriminate: “The automation’s effects touched six-year-old girls, nuns, and grandmothers hospitalized for heart failure” (179). Eubanks’s Indiana case study shows that automated public assistance is steering the poor away from assistance. Title: Virginia Eubanks (2018) Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. outcomes are the core issues explored in Virginia Eubanks’s groundbreaking new book: Automating Inequality: How High- Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor.

Eubanks automating inequality