Whatever method the border force used to determine this, I cannot imagine how AI is going to be more accurate.
Since this is the UK, see also the entire post office scandal. It was often blamed on a faulty accounting software developed by Fujitsu, even though the software put no one in jail. Human prosecutors did. But of course the British state apparatus will not admit to that, so all we hear is this story about software errors that conveniently ignores any human involvement in the process.
Likewise politicians supervising those executives somehow conveniently didn't ask any questions, forgot what they'd been told and generally had no idea what was happening.
Some of the crimes so often committed by executives who walk free needs to delete Mens Rea so that when executives say they had no idea the prosecutor doesn't even skip a beat because it doesn't matter. For comparison in UK criminal law if you have sex with a ten year old, and you try to argue† you thought they were of age and also you had their consent, the prosecutors will move on because you haven't actually defended yourself at all, sex with the ten year old was rape by definition, the fact is the crime, what you believed about it was irrelevant, you're done.
† If you have defence counsel they'll strongly urge you not to try this because it can't work
Eliminating Mens Rea would solve the problem. If they don't want to go to jail they can try being more competent, or, I expect, they can try not being crooks and what do you know all the crime they supposedly "weren't responsible for" magically stops. Huh.
Mens rea is beside the point, until the government violates other laws (and enough for famously reluctant to convict the government courts to take notice)
Likewise, proof doesn't matter.
That is a massive time sink for social workers, and the appeal of having an automated system is pretty obvious. Considering that it is already all largely guesswork, I'm not really sure that "more accurate" is even an acceptance criteria for them right now- they'd probably be very happy with "mostly the same accuracy".
Of course, the social workers are opposing being taken out of the loop, but I can't imagine that there isn't already plenty of work for them elsewhere in the UK.
in my observation: when humans are automated out of a process due to the human element being inconvenient, the perceived efficiency gains are often because wronged individuals have less recourse in the automated system.
> In another example, a Vietnamese national was initially given the benefit of the doubt at the first triage that took place in the waiting area. The CIO and social worker commented on his “soft face”, which they said was consistent with his claimed age of 17. However, his “developed shoulders” and “huge hands” cast doubt for them, as did a “tiny bit of stubble” that they noticed when they asked him to raise his chin. The CIO and social worker told inspectors afterwards that Vietnamese young people were typically difficult to assess because they “did not have the same ageing process”, and “did not show signs of ageing”. When asked where the evidence for this was, they said that it was knowledge gained through their own experience. The social worker said, “It is just genetics”, but was unable to support this with evidence.
If I had to choose between being judged by an AI model and being judged based on ad hoc stereotypes of what my race's shoulders and hands typically look like, I'd definitely pick the AI.
It's a problem when people use this kind of system to circumvent the question of "do we have to make this judgment at all". We shouldn't, for example, predict from someone's photo how likely they are to commit a crime, so we're rightly skeptical of people who try to argue about system X or system Y might better predict it.
But as the source article covers, the UK's asylum laws require it to make this age judgment, because child migrants are entitled to special programs separate from adult migrants on account of their vulnerable status.
It's true that the model might develop the same strange belief that large hands prove a Vietnamese person is not 17, if the training data is biased in that way. There's no perfect solution.
Some animals do have fairly reliable (if invasive to utilize) means of telling their age- I think their tusks grow rings like trees, which could be counted to measure years.
Humans don't really have any equivalent that I'm aware of. There are approximations such as bone fusing and cartilage density that can tell if a person is in the neighborhood of 18 years old, but I don't think it is sufficient for legal purposes.
For further reading, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2465138/#!po=3.3333... discusses using MRIs to determine age, with a roughly 1% false measurement rate on a very specific set of individuals with confounding factors- ethnic differences, nutritional habits, physical activity etc.
I cannot imagine how AI is going to be more INaccurate.