Origin · A short note

The vantage point

I did not arrive at this work from one place or one discipline. The thread that runs through it, a wariness of any system that decides for people without answering to them, came from seeing how differently that plays out depending on where you stand.

I have lived in ten countries and traveled to all seven continents, and that is the closest thing I have to a method. Seeing how many ways there are to organize a fair decision, and how many ways to get it wrong, makes you suspicious of any single system that claims to decide for everyone without answering to anyone. That suspicion is the seed of the work I do now on human judgment infrastructure: keeping a person, and an accountable one, in command of the machines that increasingly decide.

Why vantage matters for judgment

Because judgment is partly knowing that your default is not the only reasonable one. A decision rule that feels obviously fair in one place can be plainly unfair in another, and a system that bakes in one view and hides it does real harm at scale. Having stood in enough different places, I find it hard to trust the systems that pretend their values are neutral. They never are.

What I am building from it

Something narrow and, I hope, useful: the infrastructure that keeps human judgment in the loop when AI makes consequential decisions, and makes it possible to ask whose values a system holds and who answers when it is wrong. It is not a grand claim. It is a particular bet, made by someone who has seen enough to distrust the alternative.