Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

2018

DOI

10.33137/ijidi.v2i4.32206

Publication Title

The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion

Volume

2

Issue

4

Pages

87-89

Abstract

(First paragraph) With technological ubiquity and improvements comes the misguided notion that automated systems are more objective and less prone to error than the human element. While this may be true with calculations, when it comes to decisions involving the multilayered human experience, it becomes abundantly clear that this is not universally true. Increasingly, there has been a push for higher levels of automation and decreasing human involvement in the provision of government services such as Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and welfare. Automation provides a way to slash payroll spending and, ostensibly, improve services by making them more objective, and, ultimately, reduce the instance and possibility of fraud. Despite this intention, the systems designed to manage food stamps, housing assistance, and many other services accessed by the poor seem only to increase difficulties faced by the very people the services were designed to help.

Rights

Articles are licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Original Publication Citation

Bett-Green, D. (2018). [Review of the book Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor by V. Eubanks]. The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 2(4), 87-89. https://doi.org/10.33137/ijidi.v2i4.32206

ORCID

0000-0002-7215-5031 (Betts-Green)

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