The Unaccountability Machine
Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind
by Dan Davies · first published 2024
42% recommend58% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Explains how organizations diffuse responsibility through accountability sinks and decision laundering, drawing on Stafford Beer's management cybernetics. Suits engineers and managers wanting a systems view.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
<b>Longlisted for the 2024 Financial Times Book of the Year. How life and the economy became a black box—a collection of systems no one understands, producing outcomes no one likes.</b> Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a comple
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Seconding the recommendation of The Unaccountability Machine; if anyone wants a taster of the book, patio11 did a great episode of his Complex Systems podcast where he interviews the author about it: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/dan-davies-or...
on “The Tragedy of Stafford Beer (2023)” ↗Yes, absolutely - Dan Davies' "The Unaccountability Machine" is a good overview of this problem
on “The Who Cares Era” ↗There’s a great book about this called The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies.
on “Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”” ↗Time for everyone to read (or re-read) The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies. tl;dr this is exactly what will happen because businesses already do everything they can to create accountability sinks.
on “An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward” ↗You might be interested in Dan Davies' book The Unaccountability Machine[1]. It talks a fair bit about 'accountability sinks', which are exactly these systems that (intentionally or not) essentially serve as a way to unlink responsibility from any given person and allow 'the…
on “Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school” ↗> Decision laundering is a great term. Related: The Unaccountability Machine (good book by Dan Davies, who also wrote Lying for Money about financial fraud). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
on “Computers Cannot Make Decisions” ↗Re the viable system model, I can recommend Dan Davis, The Unaccountability Machine, which also touches on the Allende story, and Patrick Hoverstadt, The Fractal Organisation. My own VSM-inspired book with a modern complexity lens will be published next year.
on “The Tragedy of Stafford Beer (2023)” ↗I recently read The Unaccountability Machine (which I can recommend btw), which mentions Stafford Beer's experiments with a computing pond. Who knows, maybe we'll control our factories with mushroom brains soon!
on “Sustainable memristors from shiitake mycelium for high-frequency bioelectronics” ↗There's a book "The Unaccountability Machine" that HN may be interested in. Takes a much broader approach across management systems.
on “AI on Australian travel company website sent tourists to nonexistent hot springs” ↗Also “The Unaccountability Machine” https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo252799...
on “An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward” ↗This article seems to redefine the word "accountability". In the first sentence: > In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Why not just…
on “Accountability sinks” ↗>> In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Government…
on “Accountability sinks” ↗The recent book Unaccountability Machine (Dan Davies) made the rounds a while back on this site a few years back. A few years before that, Ted Chiang's essay in the New Yorker entitled "Will AI Become the New McKinsey?" did likewise. There's…
on “Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world” ↗THe original version of that idea seems to come from "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost Its Mind", by Dan Davies (the "Lying for Money" guy.) There's a shorter interview with him (in podcast form, includes a well-made transcript)…
on “Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)” ↗Related discussion (517 pts): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891694 https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/unaccountability-machine (A very short overview of Dan Davies' book, quoted in TFA, that came up with the term) EDIT: complementing book mentioned in that thread Cathy O'Neil's "Weapons of Math Destruction" (2016, Penguin…
on “Accountability Sinks” ↗