Against Automated Governments - REAL Resistance

Maria Pilar Llorens, Divij Joshi, Gabriel Geiger, and Purity Mukami reveal how digitised welfare is not welfare — it’s just efficiency theatre.

More like this: REAL Resistance: The AI Information Warp

This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collaboration with Real ML, featuring the experts and advocates who make up Real ML’s global network.

In this conversation, three guests from the network explore the rapid digitisation of public and judicial services around the world:

• Courts in LatAm countries are using ChatGPT to power through the case backlog. Maria Pilar Llorens explains that speed is not a virtue in judicial settings
• Kenya has adopted algorithmic proxy means-testing for healthcare — Gabriel Geiger & Purity Mukami reverse-engineered it to reveal its inequities
• Digitised public services kind of have a formula now: Divij Joshi’s work takes an aerial view of digitised payments, IDs, and consolidated data sets that govern the efficiency playbook

Further reading & resources:

• Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights Courts — Maria Pilar Llorens
• Hiding Behind AI — Gabriel & Purity’s report on the new Kenyan healthcare system
• Suspicion Machines — Gabriel Geiger et al, Lighthouse Reports March 2023
• How an algorithm denied food to thousands of poor in India’s Telangana — Divij Joshi, Tapasya, Kumar Sambhav, Al Jazeera January 2024
• AI governance in India – law, policy and political economy — Divij Joshi, 2024
• Use of Entity Resolution in India: Shining a light on how new forms of automation can deny people access to welfare — Amnesty International 2024

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Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout