Ciclo di seminari sui temi della tecnologia, delle sue precondizioni e del suo impatto sociale, economico, politico e ambientale,
promossi dal centro studi Theseus del Politecnico di Torino.

Transforming Welfare Infrastructures in Europe. The Use and Abuse of Algorithms in Decision Making

Across Europe, the welfare sector is facing increasing demands and shrinking resources. Calls to increase efficiency and effectiveness suggest introducing data-driven decision-support and enhancement with AI. In various countries, public employment services have been one of the main domains that attempt making use of the “knowledge in data” to profile job seekers and support active labor market policies. Austria’s public employment service, for instance, is introducing a semi-automated assistance system to calculate the future chances of job seekers. Based on past statistics, it looks for connections between job seekers’ characteristics and successful employment. The objective is to allocate resources for further education to those for whom the support measures are most likely to succeed. An analysis of the tensions and biases of the system calls into question the objectivity of data claims, as well as the role of algorithmic managerial practices in the transformation of the welfare state to an “enabling state” that aims at mobilizing citizens’ self-responsibility. My talk explores the extensive implementation of automated decision-making in the welfare sector across Europe. It suggests that data-based infrastructures for public administration are shaping welfare systems and transforming citizen-state relations, raising questions of human agency imbricated in complex socio-technical systems.

Interviene: Doris Allhutter, ricercatrice senior presso l’Institute of Technology Assessment dell’Accademia austriaca delle scienze, dove dirige il team austriaco di uno studio comparativo internazionale sull’automazione del welfare finanziato da Chanse. La sua ricerca si concentra sulla normatività implicita delle pratiche informatiche nel machine learning, analizzate dalla prospettiva delle relazioni di potere in cui queste pratiche sono radicate. È stata visiting researcher al Vassar College di New York, a UC Berkeley e alla Lancaster University, e fellow presso il Paderborn Research College “Data Society” e il Digital Curation Institute dell’Università di Toronto.

Introduce: Antonio Vetrò (docente di Data Ethics and Data Protection, Politecnico di Torino)

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