Increasingly, automated systems are being used to aid in the delivery of important social service programs. Dr. Jennifer Raso’s work in the area of administrative law focuses on the relationship of human and non-human collaboration on institutional decision making and the resulting legal and ethical outcomes. We talk about the challenges in delivering government programs when “people’s lives are not drop down menus”. We explore how procuring and building these systems is an area for innovation and how layering AI onto the mix introduces further complexity. We also take a critical look at efficiency and cost savings and examine if technology really delivers on these promises.

“AI adds an additional layer onto what is already a situation that is hard to entangle...the focus on the AI piece obscures what is already happening.” - Jennifer Raso

Dr. Jennifer Raso is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Law, where she studies the relationship between discretion, data-driven technologies, and administrative law. She is particularly interested in how humans/non-humans collaborate and diverge as they produce institutional decisions, and the consequences of this arrangement for procedural fairness and substantive justice.

AI4Society Dialogues is a co-production between AI4Society, a signature research area at the University of Alberta and the Kule Institute for Advanced Research (KIAS), an endowed institute at the University of Alberta that supports research in the social sciences, humanities and fine arts.

Host: Katrina Ingram, Founder and CEO, Ethically Aligned AI
Technical Producer: Corey Stroeder
Special thanks to Dr. Scott Smallwood and the Sound Studies Institute at the University of Alberta for providing recording space.
Theme music: “Seeing the Future” by Dexter Britain

Dr. Eleni Stroulia, Professor, Computer Science and Director, AI4Society
Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell, Professor, Philosophy and Digital Humanities, Director, Kule Institute and co-Director, AI4Society
Copyright 2020 University of Alberta. All rights reserved.