AI and machine learning has been in the news almost constantly for the last year, so you'd be forgiven for thinking that the era of decisions being made by computers is now here and people should just let the AIs take over. However, we must be careful. A program in use since 1998 in the US, called Compas (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), used to assess more than a million US defendants may not be accurate enough for potentially life-changing decisions. The accuracy of the program used for bail and sentencing decisions has been called into question after it was found to be no more accurate at predicting the risk of reoffending than untrained people. Read more about this in this Guardian article,
