Last year, Tom Gordon of the Fraunhofer Institute in Munich partnered with German company Init to start developing an AI application called Elterngeld – German for “parent’s money”. It is designed to make automatic decisions on child benefit claims to the country’s Federal Employment Agency (FEA), probably with some human auditing of its decisions behind the scenes, Gordon says.
Elterngeld is based on the open source Carneades software, designed by Gordon, which takes human claims like “I require government assistance to support my 5-year-old child” and determines whether the statements put forward to support the claim are justified based on the tenets of the law. Each statement is broken down and coded in a machine-readable format which the system then compares with elements of the law, using this to score the claim.