MIT Technology Review - Inside Amsterdam’s high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI

The Dutch city thought it could break a decade-long trend of implementing discriminatory algorithms. Its failure raises the question: can these programs ever be fair?

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Officials still pressed on—and set March 2023 as the date for the pilot to begin. Members of Amsterdam’s city council were given little warning. In fact, they were only informed the same month—to the disappointment of Elisabeth IJmker, a first-term council member from the Green Party, who balanced her role in municipal government with research on religion and values at Amsterdam’s Vrije University. 

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But for IJmker and some of her city council colleagues focused on social welfare, there was also the question of opportunity cost. She recalls speaking with a colleague about how else the city could’ve spent that money—like to “hire some more people to do personal contact with the different people that we’re trying to reach.” 

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That is a question that IJmker thinks about too. In city council meetings she has brought up Smart Check as an example of what not to do. While she was glad that city employees had been thoughtful in their “many protocols,” she worried that the process obscured some of the larger questions of “philosophical” and “political values” that the city had yet to weigh in on as a matter of policy. 

Questions such as “How do we actually look at profiling?” or “What do we think is justified?”—or even “What is bias?” 

These questions are, “where politics comes in, or ethics,” she says, “and that’s something you cannot put into a checkbox.”

But now that the pilot has stopped, she worries that her fellow city officials might be too eager to move on. “I think a lot of people were just like, ‘Okay, well, we did this. We're done, bye, end of story,’” she says. It feels like “a waste,” she adds, “because people worked on this for years.”

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