D. Davies (2024). The Unaccountability Machine. Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions — and How the World Lost Its Mind, Profile Books, 304 pp.
A passenger is refused permission to board an aircraft and makes a plea to a sympathetic flight attendant. Regrettably, the passenger’s grievance pertains to a company policy, and the flight attendant is unable to assist. This scenario exemplifies a scenario in which the onus of decision-making is entrusted not to an individual, but rather to a set of predetermined guidelines.
‘The unsettling thing about this conversation is that you progressively realise that the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on decisions made at a higher level of the corporate hierarchy. It’s often a frustrating experience; you want to get angry, but you can’t really blame the person you’re talking to. Somehow, the airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself.’ (p. 16)
Davies poses the question of why errors and crises never appear to be attributable to any specific individual or entity. The blame is often attributed to ‘the system’, ‘the computer’, ‘the algorithm’, ‘the AI’, or similar entities. Davies terms this phenomenon an ‘accountability sink’, a structural element that absorbs or obscures the consequences of a decision, thereby preventing direct accountability.
The phenomenon of accountability sinks, as postulated by Davies, serves to impede individuals from both willing and unwillingly making or changing decisions and, consequently, being held directly accountable for them.
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