I often describe programming as creating tiny bureaucracies.
You put some information into a "form" (e.g. a search bar). The front desk bureaucrat (mouse, keyboard, screen, etc.) sends it off to other bureaucrats and they follow a bunch of rules to process it and give the front desk some new "paperwork" to give to you (e.g. the resulting web page).
What we are doing with automated algorithms is getting rid of the human bureaucrats and replacing them with "robotic" bureaucrats. That can be a really bad thing depending on the context, but even the human bureaucrats in many cases were already ~ robots.
That said, once you can automate this stuff, there are new types of policies you can make which would be too complicated otherwise, and that is a place where we can unwittingly innovate into new ways of hurting people.
On the other hand, exposing the inherent inhumanity of strict bureaucracy via conversations about automation may actually be a force of awareness and change. An opportunity to explicitly create "human integrations" at key touch-points where people would otherwise fall through the cracks (think API hooks where you can integrate PagerDuty).
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Exactly this.
I often describe programming as creating tiny bureaucracies.
You put some information into a "form" (e.g. a search bar). The front desk bureaucrat (mouse, keyboard, screen, etc.) sends it off to other bureaucrats and they follow a bunch of rules to process it and give the front desk some new "paperwork" to give to you (e.g. the resulting web page).
What we are doing with automated algorithms is getting rid of the human bureaucrats and replacing them with "robotic" bureaucrats. That can be a really bad thing depending on the context, but even the human bureaucrats in many cases were already ~ robots.
That said, once you can automate this stuff, there are new types of policies you can make which would be too complicated otherwise, and that is a place where we can unwittingly innovate into new ways of hurting people.
On the other hand, exposing the inherent inhumanity of strict bureaucracy via conversations about automation may actually be a force of awareness and change. An opportunity to explicitly create "human integrations" at key touch-points where people would otherwise fall through the cracks (think API hooks where you can integrate PagerDuty).