Social Work and Artificial Intelligence: Into the Matrix

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a single tool, rather it is a suite of algorithmic computing capacities that can perform humanlike functions across settings. AI refers to dynamic machine intelligence, including facial recognition (computer vision), perception (computer vision and speech recognition), whole language processing (chatbots and data mining), and social intelligence (emotive computing and sentiment analysis), to name a few. The actual lines of code powering AI tools are commands that tell machines what to do, which can be neutral strings of directives. However, those who program the code, the data that powers outcomes, and the social systems in which these tools are deployed all inevitably reflect existing structural inequalities. AI now powers decision making from as benign as matching drivers to those who require transportation, to ethically fraught risk management processes, including the scoring of criminal offenders for sentencing and initial triage process in child welfare (Eubanks, 2018).