Automating inequality pdf download

Today, automated systems—rather than humans—control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.

The U. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state.

In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values. The book's final chapter offers strategies to dismantle the digital poorhouse.

Eubanks dives into history and reports from the trenches, helping us better understand the political and digital forces we are up against so we can effectively fight back. Automating Inequality exposes the deadly consequences of this plan and suggests another path. It is a book for our times. Cyril, Executive Director and Co-founder, Center for Media Justice"Automating Inequality is one of the most important recent books for understanding the social implications of information technology for marginalized populations in the US.

As we begin discussing the potential for AI to harm people, Eubanks's work should be required reading. As Eubanks makes crystal clear, automation coupled with the new technologies of ethical abandonment and instrumental efficiency threaten not only the lives of millions who are viewed as disposable but also democracy itself.

If you want to understand how this digital nightmare is reaching deep into the institutions that attempt to regulate our lives, and how you can challenge it, this is a must read. Eubanks' ethnography makes visible the politics behind our tools.

This powerful, sobering, and humane book exposes the dystopia of data-driven policy and urges us to create a more just society for all. Automating Inequality powerfully exposes how secret, high-tech monitoring systems facilitate this injustice. A must-read for everyone concerned about modern tools of inequality in America. Systems billed as a way to protect the vulnerable in fact, all too often, do just the opposite, trapping them in a modern-day star chamber.

Eubanks both gives voice to the marginalized, and offers a bold vision for dismantling the "digital poorhouse. From single mothers on welfare, to homeless individuals on the streets, to parents suspected of child neglect, the 'digital poorhouse,' as Eubanks calls it, increasingly extends its web of surveillance from classifying to predicting the poor and their behavior, not so much to aid as to manage, discipline and punish them for the poverty society imposes on them.

We learn once again that technology might be neutral but not the choices the powerful make to use it. Read this book and join with Eubanks in pushing back against the surveillance state and the injustice it sustains. For two decades, Eubanks has worked in community technology and economic justice movements. She lives in Troy, NY. Naomi Klein: "This book is downright scary. Astra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: "The single most important book about technology you will read this year.

In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect. Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change.

While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America.