The Guardian view on AI in social work: algorithms don't have all the answers Editorial

Between a tenth and a third of the jobs in Britain are at risk of being automated away, depending on which survey or well-informed guess you believe. Should social workers be among them? It might seem that the particular and personal skills of social work are of a nature that could never be replaced by a machine, but from the point of view of an economist they are part of the machinery to provide help in the most cost-effective way. This involves judgment: which families need what kind of help most urgently? And that kind of classification is one of the things that various forms of artificial intelligence promise to do better and more quickly than unaided human beings.