Which sounds more horrific: trapped as a victim of a bureaucratic system where some shadowy individual or cabal orchestrates it to move against you; or trapped as a victim of an automated bureaucracy, no one meaning you ill-intent, but the entire mechanism arrayed against you nonetheless, and no one in any position to do anything about it?

The world, and society, are far too complex for any one person to fully comprehend how things operate in totality. Laws and bureaucracy automate the running of society in the way we’ve chosen to live – a consensus compromise of what the majority of those who had a say can tolerate.

Automation of social systems can be egalitarian. It can remove personal biases from decisions – other than those built into the system. But when things go wrong, it could mean there’s no one who can step in and fix it.

If no one has direct responsibility for a decision, then anyone involved may avoid getting tarred with the responsibility in case they make the wrong choice. They instead trust that the system does what it’s supposed to do – maybe assuming someone is overseeing things. That the system is working correctly, because of course it is. It’s the law. As though the law is some immutable dogma, rather than a constantly tinkered-with framework.

The system works by removing human thought and judgement from the equation. It makes things both fairer and more efficient, but can never be free from error, if only because it’s implemented by humans – though not necessarily ones with any responsibility. The system is intended to take over this responsibility, functionally becoming a limited artificial intelligence that runs society.

Such a system is still open to exploitation. Individuals can always target the system in certain ways, so it views others as being in contravention of its dogma – whether they are or not. Though there’s more danger harm being caused by unintended consequences.

Example

An example would be the attempted deportation of those who’ve resided in the country since they were children, but the processes when they were welcomed half a century ago were less stringent about making things official.

Victims of decisions forced by the political climate, for a system too vast to avoid unintended consequences from even the most well-meaning decision. So petty decisions, based on ugly politics, would of course have innocent victims.

The decision was of course made at a high level, left to others lower down to implement. Yet do any of the individuals involved have responsibility? I’m not talking about blame, which is a political inevitability when things go wrong. Was the initial instruction too vague? Or was it poorly interpreted when implemented? Or is the fault purely due to their limited grasp of how the ruling will impact everyone touched by it?

Because the limits of human judgement can be influenced by so many factors, and like any automated system, society can only produce results based on what’s fed into it.

Human Oversight

The system isn’t without oversight, of course. Appeals may be made to attempt to find a human willing to take responsibility for the decision. Someone with the power to do so, ideally. Responsibility without control only makes scapegoats, so it’s hardly surprising that few without the power to effect certain changes would be inclined to intercede. And anyone with the power may be too far up to hear about such things, or to realise it comes under their purview.

Such oversight will be nowhere near as efficient as the automated system though, offering a different flavour of frustration as the process grinds on.

Bottleneck

Ultimately, bureaucratic automation is designed to minimise the impact upon the majority. Because manually maintaining a perfect system would require so much constant attention as to be counterproductive. Such problems may not be solvable. They’re simply a feature of a system designed to accommodate such a vastly overpopulated society.

But if the survival of the social engine is placed above the wellbeing of the individuals making up that society, then society becomes more important than people. It may be hard to see if you’re not currently a victim of it, but such systems operate on logic, and the simply logic is that if the system itself is more important than an individual, then it’s more important than any individual. And it’d be far too easy a step to see it as more important than every individual.

The system was created to make life easier for us, to enable us to live together. How much do we put the ease of the majority above the well-being of the individual?

Solutions? Anyone?

How can such automation of responsibility be countered? Not easily while maintaining the useful structure of society.

Decentralisation of the authority for such choices is one possibility, but then you revert to the problem of allowing biases in. Homogenisation of the wider culture blurs – to a limited degree – the lines of us and them. Allowing increased autonomy to subsections, while it may fight disenfranchisement, risks retrenching lines of demarcation between us and them, alienating the others. With such an increasingly mobile population, this risks even greater disenfranchisement.

Any process to reintegrate human judgement will likely reintroduce explicit biases. Group decisions on matters may alleviate the issue, but they also increase the bureaucracy and time taken. Slowing the procedures and enhancing the sense of alienation of those caught up in bureaucracy.

Are we stuck with a choice between the equality of being statistics in a system, or the sluggish, biased, human bureaucracy of a civilisation grinding to a halt under the weight of its own complexity?

Or are we stuck in the middle, with a system that seems to have the worst of both? With no one willing to take responsibility for this larger existential problem of society.