Prosthetic or Supervisor?: AI and the Remaking of the British State

人工智能（AI）系统正在影响英国公共政策决策的根本变化，甚至重组了儿童社会关怀等敏感主题。虽然在刑事司法等领域研究了人工智能的使用，但学术界或政治上对人工智能在社会护理中的应用的关注较少，尽管受影响者存在固有的脆弱性，并且可能存在基于社会经济地位、种族和性别的偏见。更广泛地说，人工智能系统超越了统计数据的传统角色，比如枚举人口、描述社会现象的水平，或者最近对英国“What Works”议程中政策平均结果的因果评估。相反，人工智能系统允许风险个性化——即使系统从历史数据中“学习”，决策的制定和解释有时也是基于单个人的数据，而不是适用于所有符合固定标准的人的官僚规则。然后，该项目将研究为什么公务员选择采用人工智能系统，考虑到这些与以往实践的差异，以及人工智能在公共政策中伦理使用的影响，重点是儿童的社会关怀。这包括ESRC优先级2（数字社会），确保社会科学指导人工智能技术的采用，以及优先级5（人类行为），将心理学和政策联系起来。理由是，尽管有人保证人工智能将改善国家决策，但这并不总是基于证据，也很少公开辩论。例如，我为What Works Centre For Children’s Social Care （Clayton, Gibbons, Schoenwald, Surkis, and Sanders 2020）共同撰写的一份报告发现，如果一个机器学习模型识别出一个孩子有风险，十次中有六次是错误的，这意味着如果部署，大量的儿童和家庭可能会遭受错误干预的后果。因此，这种转变的政治风险很高，并突显出越来越需要对国家使用的人工智能系统进行监管。这是迫切需要的，以帮助保护公民免受滥用或不准确系统的负面后果，同时使他们能够从人工智能的适当使用中受益。在学科层面上，本文的基本原理是提高对技术在塑造和被国家实践塑造中的作用的理解。例如，在政治理论中，技术通常被假定为不存在，通常是通过分析一个给定的社会，如Gabriel（2022）所说，具有“特定的社会技术特征（即具有有效的法律体系、经济分工、税收能力等）”（219）。最后，这个项目的时机恰逢其时，因为人工智能系统显然是政策关注的焦点，英国政府正在就发布新的人工智能原则进行咨询，荷兰创建了世界上第一个算法登记册，欧盟于2022年12月通过了人工智能法规。然而，所有这些努力都远未达到世界银行（2021年）所呼吁的“新的数据社会契约”，例如，因为新的法规往往侧重于人工智能系统的安全开发，而不是规范人工智能系统可能被合理使用的目的。同样，由于采纳了乔什·麦卡利斯特（Josh MacAlister）于2022年发表的影响深远的《儿童社会关怀独立评论》（Independent Review of Children’s social care）中的建议，对社会关怀的关注是恰当的。

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are effecting a fundamental change in decision-making across public policy in the UK, reorganising even sensitive subjects such as children's social care. While the use of AI has been studied in areas such as criminal justice, there has been less scholarly or political attention to the use of AI in social care, despite the inherent vulnerability of those affected and potential for biases based on socioeconomic status,ethnicity, and gender.More broadly, AI systems move past the traditional roles of statistics in enumerating populations, describing the levels of social phenomena, or the more recent causal evaluation of average outcomes of policies in the British "What Works" agenda. Instead, AI systems allow for the personalisation of risk - decisions are made and sometimes explained based on a single person's data, even if the systems "learn" from historical data, rather than bureaucratic rules that apply to all persons who meet fixed criteria.This project will then examine why public servants choose to adopt AI systems given these differences from prior practice and the implications for the ethical use of AI in public policy with a focus on children's social care. This covers ESRC Priority 2 (Digital Society) by ensuring social science guides the adoption of AI technologies and Priority 5 (Human Behaviour) by linking psychology and policy.The rationale is that despite assurances that AI will improve state decision-making, this is not always evidence-based and rarely publicly debated. For instance, a report I co-authored for the What Works Centre for Children's Social Care (Clayton, Gibbons, Schoenwald, Surkis, and Sanders 2020) found that if a machine learning model identifies a child is at risk, it is wrong six out of ten times, meaning if deployed a significant number of children and families could suffer the consequences of wrongful intervention. The political stakes of this shift are therefore high and highlight the increasing need for regulation of AI systems used by the state. This is urgently needed to help protect citizens from the negative consequences of misused or inaccurate systems while allowing them to benefit from the appropriate usage of AI.On a disciplinary level, the rationale for the thesis is to improve understanding of the role of technology in shaping and being shaped by state practice. For instance, in political theory, technology is typically assumed away, often by analysing a given society with, as Gabriel (2022) puts it, a "specific sociotechnical character (that is, one with a functioning legal system, economic division of labor, capacity for taxation, and so on)" (219).Finally, the timing of this project is opportune as AI systems are starkly in policy focus, with the UK government consulting on releasing new AI principles, the Netherlands creating the world's first algorithm register, and the European Union passing the Artificial Intelligence Regulation in December 2022. However, all of these efforts fall far short of the World Bank's (2021) call for a "new social contract for data", for example because new regulations tend to focus on the safe development of AI systems, rather than regulating purposes for which AI systems might be justly used. Similarly, the focus on social care is apt due to adoption of recommendations in the far-reaching Independent Review of Children's Social Care by Josh MacAlister published in 2022.