Working as Intended
Alignment, efficiency, legitimacy, administration and design can each certify the same system.
Recent essays
AI essays
Essays about automation, prediction, legitimacy, and who gets made to absorb the cost of technical systems. 17 essays in this theme.
Essays about automation, prediction, legitimacy, and who gets made to absorb the cost of technical systems.
17 essays · the pattern that runs through most of them is Conditional authority
Start with Aligned With Whom?
Aligned With Whom?
An AI that does exactly what its owner wants still doesn’t explain why it holds authority over you, or how you correct it when it’s wrong.
Keep Part of Your Thinking Outside the AI
Clicking the final button isn’t control once the model has learned how you think.
An Audit That Can't Stop Anything Is Theater
Transparency, participation, and better categories present as democratization.
Guilty Until Verified
When institutions treat every user as an adversary, compliance becomes evasion.
What Happens to the Web When AI Agents Do the Clicking
Amazon's cancellation maze worked because people get tired.
Ask Any Ethics Board What It Has Stopped
Oversight that performs responsibility without the power to force a sacrifice.
A Police Risk Score Is a Political Judgment
A police department’s scoring tool decides who is “worth attention” by a definition the vendor keeps secret.
Prediction Is Rule-Making
A model that denies a loan is enforcing a rule about who counts as risky, whatever the vendor says about discovering it.
Consensus Without Conflict Is a Lie
In journalism, science, and law, we know that a single, smooth answer is dangerous.
Exclusion Has Been a Business Since 1493
Papal decrees, slave-voyage insurance, redlining and algorithmic tenant screening: each time one method was banned, the business found another.
AGI Will Look Like a Perfect Bureaucrat
AI won’t rescue us from our own willingness to discard people. It just magnifies it.
AI Is Being Built for Austerity
Insurers, benefit managers and hospital chains present AI as an efficiency gain and use it to cut costs, consolidate markets and discipline clinical labor.
Control Makes Institutions Brittle
Workplaces, wards and governments that choose control over trust lose the ability to adapt, and break when conditions change.
When an Algorithm Decides You're Not Normal
AI systems now decide whose behavior reads as normal.
Explaining an AI Decision Doesn't Let You Change It
Audits and explanation tools have become an industry.
AI's Catastrophic Risk Is Already in the Welfare Office
The apocalypse debate looks at the horizon.
Continue reading
Related context
Version history
No prior versions in this archive snapshot.
Each version says how much changed from the one before it: wording (under 5% of the words), a revision, or a rewrite (more than a third). The measure counts words that moved; whether a claim changed takes reading.
New essays by email
One letter a week: that week’s new essays, and one tool to use.
Your address isn’t shared. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe.
New essays by email
One letter a week: that week’s new essays, and one tool to use.
Your address isn’t shared. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe.