Context
Institutions where impoverished individuals were housed and required to work under harsh conditions.
What is a poorhouse?
The city where the Coordinated Entry System ranks homeless individuals for housing.
What is Los Angeles?
These tools are often assumed to be neutral, but Eubanks shows they’re not.
What are algorithms?
Author of Automating Inequality.
Who is Virginia Eubanks?
Eubanks says this must be part of the design process if we want truly fair systems.
Lived experience or the voices of impacted communities
Term that Eubanks uses to describe modern systems that control the poor
What is the digital poorhouse?
The U.S. state where an automated welfare eligibility system caused mass denials of benefits due to technical errors and lack of human oversight.
What is Indiana?
The term for automated suspicion or scrutiny based on risk scores.
What is red-flagging?
Eubanks’ profession.
What is a political scientist?
This must be included in the design process to make systems fair.
What is human oversight?
This label was used to deny benefits in Indiana, even for simple application errors.
What is failure to cooperate?
The name of the county where child maltreatment risk scores are used to help screen hotline calls.
What is Allegheny County?
A key flaw in using historical data to train decision-making systems.
What is bias replication?
Her call to action: systems should be designed with this value in mind.
What is human dignity?
Government agencies use this kind of card to monitor where benefits are spent.
What is an EBT card?
The historical movement that used data, “casework,” and eugenics to manage the poor.
What is scientific charity?
This experiment in Indiana replaced in-person caseworkers with a privatized call center system.
What is the 2006 eligibility modernisation project?
This group is most affected by algorithmic surveillance in public service systems.
Who are low-income or marginalized communities?
Eubanks argues AI doesn’t fix inequality—it does this instead.
What is automate it?
According to Eubanks, automation in welfare systems increases surveillance while removing this.
What is human accountability?
The concept that emerged in Chapter 5 to describe the invisible infrastructure of modern poverty control.
What is a digital poorhouse?
This error-prone approach resulted in over 1 million benefit denials in Indiana from 2007 to 2009.
What is automated eligibility processing?
A key principle Eubanks says we must demand from AI in social programs.
What is transparency?
This personal experience sparked Eubanks’ urgency to explore digital injustice.
Her partner being attacked and then denied insurance coverage due to algorithmic red-flagging
Eubanks says the poor are not only over-surveilled but also lack this.
What is the right to privacy or agency?