Article by John Croker: “Technology has been at the heart of two injustices that courts have labelled significant miscarriages of justice. The first example will be familiar now to many people in the UK: colloquially known as the ‘post office’ or ‘horizon’ scandal. The second is from Australia, where the Commonwealth Government sought to utilise AI to identify overpayment in the welfare system through what is colloquially known as the ‘Robodebt System’. The first example resulted in the most widespread miscarriage of justice in the UK legal system’s history. The second example was labelled “a shameful chapter” in government administration in Australia and led to the government unlawfully asserting debts amounting to $1.763 billion against 433,000 Australians, and is now the subject of a Royal Commission seeking to identify how public policy failures could have been made on such a significant scale.
Both examples show that where technology and AI goes wrong, the scale of the injustice can result in unprecedented impacts across societies….(More)”.