Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

During each depression in the US, “critics blamed relief programs for creating dependence on public assistance” (26). Why does this critique of relief programs arise? How can we stop this cycle, according to Eubanks?

Research one of the works Eubanks references in her book, including George Orwell’s 1984, or Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. Why does she include these works? Do they add to her argument? Why or why not?

Should private companies be allowed to win outsourced contracts for public services, like what happened with IBM/ACS in Indiana? Why or why not?

LA’s coordinated entry system is “touted as the Match.com of homeless services” (84). What does this metaphor say about the approach big tech takes to creating solutions for poverty and homelessness?

Algorithms fail because their datasets only include variables and patterns that have previously existed or because they replicate their creators’ biases. How does Eubanks propose working with these limitations?

Explore Eubanks’s discussion of technological knowledge gaps, both on the part of users and on the part of technologists. Where does she see the largest breakdowns and why?

Which group is better equipped to tackle progressive social change: local volunteers and activists, or elected officials? Use evidence from the book.

Eubanks advocates, “a data-based system [encouraging] poor and working-class people to use resources to meet their needs in their own ways?” (212). How would such a system work?