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

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (2018) by political scientist Virginia Eubanks chronicles the history of the welfare support system in the US, focusing on its widening inadequacies due to the rise of automation and artificial intelligence technologies. While proponents of these techniques believe them to be revolutionary solutions, Eubanks argues that despite promising to “shake up hidebound bureaucracies” and “increase transparency,” the new regime of data analytics “is simply an expansion and continuation of moralistic and punitive poverty management strategies” present since the 1820s (37). She uses several case studies of automation in public assistance across America to explain her argument.

Critically lauded on publication, Automating Equality won the 2019 Lillian Smith Book Award, the 2018 McGannon Center Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice.

Plot Summary

Eubanks uses the history of the poorhouse—a way to punish and contain the impoverished in the 19th and early 20th centuries—as a metaphor for modern automated data and technological systems. Eubanks argues that the digital entrapments of the modern welfare state are just a digital version of these rickety structures, making profit from poverty in a similar manner.