Categories
cybernetics

Productive Misanthropy

Service delivery systems must model the environments they act within. This is unavoidable. Eligibility rules, risk categories, performance metrics, and compliance frameworks are all abstractions that allow action under constraint. The model is not the world. It is an interface that reduces complexity to something administrable. Over time, however, the interface acquires weight. The abstraction […]

Categories
Philosophy

Robodebt

The Robodebt scheme, deployed between 2015 and 2019, exemplifies how an administrative shortcut can cascade into human tragedy. By averaging annual tax data to infer fortnightly income, it raised hundreds of thousands of false debts against vulnerable Australians. The program caused profound distress, with reports linking it to suicides among those wrongly accused of owing […]