The joke
Rows of servers doing the work, and one small desk for the person who carries the can.
The irony
We tend to imagine AI taking the jobs. It's harder to imagine it taking the blame, and for good reason: it can't. Software doesn't stand in front of a customer, a regulator or a court. So as machines do more of the work, the human roles that remain may look less like doing and more like answering. One person, a lot of servers.
So what?
Our papers propose that every capability has a Nucleus: a named person who answers for it, even when AI does all the work. In the UK, section 155 of the Companies Act 2006 says a company must have at least one director who is a natural person; our reading is that an AI can't be that director, and a solicitor should confirm it. The open question is the one in the cartoon: when a chain of capabilities fails, who answers? We don't know yet.
In your organisation, who answers when the software gets it wrong? Tell us in the comments, or respond to the paper.
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