Get the latest tech news
Inside Amsterdam’s high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI
The Dutch city thought it could break a decade-long trend of implementing discriminatory algorithms. Its failure raises the question: can these programs ever be fair?
It was February 2023, and de Zwart, who had served as the executive director of Bits of Freedom, the Netherlands’ leading digital rights NGO, had been working as an informal advisor to Amsterdam’s city government for nearly two years, reviewing and providing feedback on the AI systems it was developing. Other cities, like Amsterdam and Leiden, used a system called the Fraud Scorecard, which was first deployed more than 20 years ago and included education, neighborhood, parenthood, and gender as crude risk factors to assess welfare applicants; that program was also discontinued. “There’s a high-level thing of Do not discriminate, which I think we can all agree on, but this example highlights some of the complexities of how you translate that [principle].” Ultimately, Chen believes that finding any solution will require trial and error, which by definition usually involves mistakes: “You have to pay that cost.”
Or read this on r/technology
