Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Analytics in Decision Making: The Migration and Asylum Systems

Abstract

Big data and artificial intelligence inform decisions that affect people in their daily lives worldwide. Now, decision support systems are becoming increasingly frequent in sensitive contexts such as criminal justice or health insurance as they are considered objective, neutral and organic instruments whose decisions are purely based on facts. This is driven by the idea that human biases, emotions and discriminatory tendencies do not take part in their decision-making process. Yet, there is an overwhelming debate about the notions of fairness and effectiveness and the consequences that may arise from the implementation of these technologies in sensitive social and institutional contexts. Decision-making support tools are daily used in the judicial and migration areas to strengthen effectiveness and fairness while speeding up the often tedious and processes. However, technological automatisation and support systems are not always good allies of liberal values. The goal of accelerating judicial procedures and migration's and refugee's applications, increasing their efficiency, or better allocating limited resources could easily collide with the protection of individuals' rights; such as transparency, fair trial, dignity, or explanation. This paper will analyse the challenges and risk resulting from...