Artificial intelligence in children's services: the ethical and practical issues

Predictive algorithms promoted and used by Hackney council to identify those most in need of scarce preventive services is an important issue for us to think more deeply about. In that article, Steve Liddicott reasoned that in the context of reduced spending on prevention services, identifying those most in need earlier could prevent children ending up in more intensive services like child protection. The article presents the reduction of spending as a given and promotes algorithms as a method of distributing what little is left. In this response, we argue this is not a benign activity and is ethically fraught. Firstly, the reduction of services leaves significant holes that an algorithm can't fix.