‘Det risikoscorede menneske’

“If we do not discuss ‘digital citizen rights’ now, we are risking a systematic discrimination based on data and processes that we cannot understand and for which no one can be held accountable for.”

In last Friday’s Weekendavisen, Professor in TiP and Head of the Center for Digital Welfare Brit Ross Winthereik discusses the increasing use of artificial intelligence within welfare systems and the problematic that raise from the uninformed usage of data sets.
She points out that a lot of hope underlays the strive towards the digitization of welfare functions – the hope that technology can simplify and objectify processes deciding who is allowed to receive benefits from the state through eliminating the ‘subjective’ decision-making of a caseworker.

But how are basic human rights understood in this context and how can be assured that they are not violated, when citizens are profiled within a certain group based on existing data sets and consequently get assigned a ‘risk score’? Who can be held accountable and responsible for such violations created by algorithms?

To read the full article click here [in Danish].