Who pays for this work
The essays are free to read. I work in healthcare AI, and some of that work is paid for by the kinds of institutions these essays criticize.
I sell independent safety evaluations of healthcare AI, listed on kanav.net. I sell them to health plans that use AI for prior authorization, utilization management and claims review, to healthcare AI companies preparing for funding, large customers or FDA submissions, and to investors doing diligence on them. I’m also building NextConsensus, a commercial product that tracks when medical evidence moves ahead of clinical guidelines. I previously built healthcare products at Doximity, Transcarent and Epic.
The open standards at ethotechnics.org are free under CC BY-SA 4.0; the evaluations are the paid work. Several essays here criticize prior authorization and the insurers who run it. If one reads as going easy on a buyer, or as selling a service, contest it.
About Kanav Jain
My research starts from a relationship that runs both ways: people build and sustain the institutions that shape what they can do next, and working inside those institutions changes their skills, obligations, alternatives, and authority. We're practiced at measuring what an arrangement produces now, and far less practiced at measuring what producing it does to the conditions under which the next round happens — where an arrangement can expand the people in it, or make itself harder to change. The failure this archive watches closest is one trajectory of that loop: systems that get people wrong, turn those wrong records into decisions that bind them, and exercise power with no one in particular in charge. Drawing on systems engineering, cybernetics, and political philosophy—including republican non-domination and social reproduction theory—I study what it takes for institutions to stay answerable to the people they govern. A central hypothesis is that institutional performance can improve while the people affected lose the practical ability to question its decisions, develop alternatives, or change its rules. The governing question is who gets to spend whose life: human capacity is finite, institutions are fallible, and power decides whose limits an arrangement accommodates and whose adaptability it extracts as a free subsidy. Production is a means; the aim is the greatest capacity for living.
The aim is shared institutions that help people develop new capabilities while retaining collective authority over how those institutions change.
Who can change a system that works?
A worker covers a staffing gap and the service keeps running. The next schedule can assume the same extra effort. The essays ask who carries that work and what it does to their power to change the arrangement.
An institution can deliver good results while leaving the people who sustain it with less time, skill, or authority to shape what happens next. That divergence is a hypothesis to investigate, including where a system is accurate and nobody has broken a rule.
The goal is institutions strong enough to run shared life that cannot use people up to keep themselves running.
Central hypothesis
What the program studies
Successful adaptation can reduce the pressure to redesign an arrangement while consuming the resources people would need to change it. I trace that process through the work people do around rules, the costs in the institution's records, and the decisions those people can actually change.
The test includes what happens over time: who gains new skills, who loses alternatives, and who can set different terms. Useful support may expand those possibilities. A care service can give someone more freedom by providing reliable help and giving them a say in how it's delivered.
The framework asks three distinct questions about an institution: who bears its costs, who can make it change, and what it was entitled to decide. Better performance on one doesn’t settle the others. The three questions give each a concrete example.
Four questions this research asks
Who absorbs the variance?
A faster process may eliminate work or move it onto someone else. I trace the total cost, including the time, uncertainty, and risk people carry outside the institution's accounts, and how that cost changes over time.
Could the affected people refuse?
The cost of saying no can change as people depend more on an arrangement. I ask whether they can refuse or renegotiate its demands while retaining access to care, income, and the support they need.
Does the institution perceive the compensatory cost?
A completed task can hide the repair that made it possible. I ask whether the institution records that work, whether it has the means to remove its cause, and what happens when it knows the cost but leaves the arrangement intact.
Can that evidence alter the cause?
Correcting a file may leave the rule that produced the problem unchanged. I ask what the people affected can change, who controls the resources needed to do it, and whether their authority grows or shrinks as the institution develops.
How this work relates to other research
The work draws on systems engineering and political philosophy, including traditions recorded in the archive's lineage. It uses engineering questions about maintenance and failure to study who carries institutional costs and who can change the terms.
The proposed contribution is a testable account of correction capacity: who can make an institution fix what it gets wrong, what it costs them, and how the work that sustains the institution changes both. Individual essays offer arguments and cases; they don't establish one mechanism across every domain.
The essays develop the arguments and describe how these arrangements are lived. The research page has the field cases. Ethotechnics publishes proposed design standards and record formats.
Any proposed remedy also has to account for who will do its repair work, whose resources it uses, and how the people affected can challenge it. Necessary commitments can close some options while making others possible; their costs and authority need justification.
Where to go next
Capable and correctable
The program in three concepts: how arrangements become necessary, how adaptation makes them durable, and why freedom requires effective revisability.
Start here
The short guide to the framework: the core claim, the main patterns, and where to go next.
Method
The canonical diagram set, seven framework tests, and the method for reading institutions through burden, livability, and correction.
Patterns
The recurring patterns the essays trace, each with its questions, mechanisms, and reading order.
The archive
235 essays tracing the same structural patterns across healthcare, work, bureaucracy, platforms, and public administration.
Domain applications
The framework applied to healthcare, work, AI systems, education, disability and mental health, law, and politics.