Friday marked the end of the public hearings for the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme. They painted a picture of a catastrophic program that was legally and ethically indefensible – an example of how technological overreach, coupled with dereliction of duty can amount to immense suffering for ordinary people.
The artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm behind Robodebt has been called “flawed”. But it was worse than that; it broke laws of mathematics. A mathematical law called Jensen’s inequality shows the Robodebt algorithm should have generated not only debts, but also credits.
