Description

According to Dean Williams, governments around the world are deploying automation tools in making decisions that affect rights and entitlements. The interests affected are very broad, ranging from time spent in detention to the receipt of social security benefits. Drawing on examples from the United States, Australia, Sweden and the People’s Republic of China, the talk focused on the impact on rule of law values of automation using: (1) pre-programmed rules (for example, expert systems); and (2) predictive inferencing whereby rules are derived from historic data (such by applying supervised  machine learning). It explored the tension between the rule of law and rapid technological change and concludes with observations on how the automation of government decision-making can both enhance and detract from rule of law values such as due process rights.

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