Inside Amsterdam's high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI

From his vantage point behind the sweeping arc of glass windows at Amsterdam's city hall, Paul de Koning, a consultant to the city whose résumé includes stops at various agencies in the Dutch welfare state, had viewed the same system with pride. De Koning, who managed Smart Check's pilot phase, was excited about what he saw as the project's potential to improve efficiency and remove bias from Amsterdam's social benefits system. A team of fraud investigators and data scientists had spent years working on Smart Check, and de Koning believed that promising early results had vindicated their approach. The city had consulted experts, run bias tests, implemented technical safeguards, and solicited feedback from the people who'd be affected by the program--more or less following every recommendation in the ethical-AI playbook. "I got a good feeling," he told us.