AI and unaccountability sinks

“The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions — and How The World Lost its Mind” is a brilliant book if you are into system dynamics. It is a book about the industrialisation of decision-making.

Building systems

The Unaccountability Machine is about the biggest problem of modern industrial life — the problem of being overloaded with information, of trying to get a drink from a firehose. When people are overwhelmed by information, they always react in the same way — by building systems and by narrowing the information space. That has implications:

That has implications:

• As organisations grow, they become more complicated, making it difficult to add enough capacity to manage this complexity.
• Because they narrow the information space, every decision-making system is, implicitly, a model.
• It creates a fundamental change in the relationship between decision makers and those affected by their decisions.
• Every year, more of the decisions that affect our lives…