AI snoops

SPAIN’S Social Security system is using artificial intelligence to try to predict whether someone who is taking sick leave is ready to get back to work.

That’s according to an investigation carried out by Spanish online daily El Confidencial Spain’s National Institute of Social Security deployed two machine-learning algorithms in 2018 to assess the health of millions of people on sick leave.

The aim was to detect which recipients were defrauding the state.

The investigation discovered that the system is very opaque and that its algorithms are considered to be ‘poor’ and ‘unbalanced’. It also alleged to generate a high number of false positives, which could potentially be pushing people back into work before they are medically fit to do so.