Former social worker Thea Ramirez has developed an artificial intelligence-powered tool that she says helps social service agencies find the best adoptive parents for some of the nation’s most vulnerable kids.
Online dating is a mess and horrible way to date why would she base her tool on that?
And if it’s based on algorithms more fit for dating, kids with most problems would be the least likely to find adopting parents.
“Babe wake up, new way to sort and shop for adopted kids just droppd, just swipe left or right on this orphans face . . .”
Top-down bureaucracies are bad at adoption. That’s just obvious at this point. If you want to use a computer to fix this problem, you can’t simply automate the existing structure. You need to actually think about how you can use the computer to do something qualitatively and structurally different than what we’re currently doing, instead of the same basic thing but faster and with more data.
This is why I say that capitalism uses computers backwards. I even used online dating as an example when I wrote that almost a year ago. If you think within capitalism, and you incorporate yourself as a capitalist firm, even if you try to do good things, the structure of your solution will reflect that of your organization, and many of our problems simply don’t respond well to that.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“We’re using science – not merely preferences – to establish a score capable of predicting long-term success,” Ramirez said in an April 2021 YouTube video about her ambitions to flip “the script on the way America matches children and families” using the Family-Match algorithm.
Virginia and Georgia dropped the algorithm after trial runs, noting its inability to produce adoptions, though both states have resumed business with Ramirez’s nonprofit called Adoption-Share, according to AP’s review of hundreds of pages of documents.
Those experiences, the AP found, provide lessons for social service agencies seeking to deploy predictive analytics without a full grasp of the technologies’ limitations, especially when trying to address such enduring human challenges as finding homes for children described by judges as the “least adoptable.”
Her work and her religious convictions drew support primarily from conservatives, including first lady Melania Trump, who spotlighted Ramirez’s efforts at a foster care event in the White House Situation Room.
Virginia’s then-governor Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, ordered a pilot at the urging of a campaign donor he appointed as the state’s “adoption champion.” In Florida, which has a privatized child welfare system, regional care organizations soon signed up for the algorithm for free – thanks to a grant from a foundation founded by the then-CEO of the company that makes Patrón tequila and his wife.
Ramirez met with the governor’s office and also lobbied a statehouse committee for a direct appropriation, saying the tool was “an incredible feat.” By July, the Georgia Department of Human Services signed a new agreement with Adoption-Share to use Family-Match again – this time for free, said Kylie Winton, an agency spokesperson.
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