Automation in public administration is inevitable and can bring great benefits. The broadly accepted law of robotics is that a robot may not injure a human being. In an attempt to reduce welfare costs in 2016, the commonwealth government engaged in an unlawful debt recovery process. The bureaucratic process was malign and was meant either directly or collaterally to harm and stigmatise welfare recipients. The Online Compliance Intervention – or OCI, but more commonly known as robodebt – used algorithms to average out incomes of welfare recipients by matching ATO income data with social welfare recipients' income as self-reported to Centrelink with Centrelink.