AI not to blame for Robodebt failures

Artificial intelligence is being unfairly blamed for the failure of the previous government’s Robodebt scheme, according to the Centre for Augmented Reasoning.

The Adelaide-based research centre’s Director, Professor Anton van den Hengel, said the problems that arose as a result of the scheme were the direct result of human, not AI-based, decision-making.

“The report into Robodebt clearly states that there was no AI involved, just ordinary human decision-making applied at scale. Automated application of human decisions magnifies their impact, but they remain human decisions,” he said.

“Let’s be very clear about Robodebt: there was no AI used at all in the operation of a scheme that was flawed at the very outset. The report makes clear that Robodebt used income averaging to estimate debt recovery, which was ‘a patently unreliable methodology’. This is not just mathematically unsound, it has nothing to do with AI.”

Hagen called the failed scheme “ideologically motivated”, and noted that an AI would not come up with such a scheme because it has no ideology or political position. “If AI had been involved we’d never have had Robodebt,” he said.

Hagen insisted that much of the current fear of AI is baseless, and argued that AI has the potential to help people get the assistance they need from an organisation like Centrelink.

“Instead of identifying how AI can help, we’ve labelled all AI in government as evil just because someone thought that adding Robo to a debt problem would get more attention,” he said.

“AI is a set of computer programs that do what people ask them to. We all use them multiple times a day. Don’t ban the technology, because anything can be used for negative purposes.”

Image credit: iStock.com/Shutthiphong Chandaeng