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@ Miguel Afonso Caetano
2025-02-24 21:32:14
"Eventually, Austin turned to lawyers at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, who learned that Texas’ automated verification system, developed by multinational consulting firm Deloitte, had made extensive and repeated errors, including issuing incorrect notices, wrongful denials, and losing paperwork.
For the next two years, Austin continued to reapply to Texas’ safety-net programs as he bounced in and out of temporary housing, eventually losing his car. While his daughter grew into a busy toddler, he turned to the unreliable kindness of strangers on the street. “I ended up begging people for money so I could give her pull-ups, or child care so I could take a [medical] appointment,” he says.
Though De Liban was not involved with Austin’s case, he has worked with scores of people trapped in similar situations — victims of algorithmic decisions gone wrong. These kinds of systemic harms are already impacting Americans in every phase of their lives, he says. “Our legal mechanisms are totally insufficient to deal with the scale and scope of harms these technologies can cause.”
In Arkansas, De Liban won case after case for people who were denied medical care or other benefits because of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. But each victory underscored the deeper problem: The sheer scale of government actions being made by machines mimicking human decision-making, whether through simple code or machine learning, meant that individual legal victories weren’t sufficient."
https://www.levernews.com/rage-against-the-algorithm/
#AI #Algorithms #USA #ML #Automation #AIGovernment