PPA has explored the genesis and transformation of risk classification tools used by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and review the impact that alterations of an algorithmic decision-making tool had on detentions, and the political provenance of such alterations.

Increasingly, automated and algorithmic systems are being used to make decisions that impact on people’s lives. But little, if any consideration is given to helping the commissioners, designers and operators of these systems to consider the knock-on effects of the decisions being made.

Policy design can be described as the modelling of the society that we would want to see, or the ‘future subjunctive’ expression of it. Policy design can be informed by ‘backcasting’ from a desirable future state, working backwards from there to determine which policy measures would be required to reach that desired end-state.

Machines are making decisions today that will have a profound impact on people’s lives tomorrow. All too often, automated systems are opaque, with little explanation of how they work and how they will impact on people’s lives. Such systems often represent people reductively, without taking into consideration the things that may be important to them.

PPA has explored how algorithmic decision-making works in welfare and looked at the possibilities for using algorithmic decision-making to arrive at fairer and more transparent welfare outcomes. Seeing and working with mess rather than rendering it ‘invisible’ to digital systems.