1. Database engineering and confidentiality obligations has already made the machinery of state relatively difficult to survey in the 90s. The US social security database system, or its retirement processes, for instance, are insanely arcane, slow, and error prone. My guess is that we can significantly boost legibility in the coming decades with LLM, and it’s unfortunate that the first such effort was led by Musk and not a nice technocratic neoliberal.
2. You are using black-box in almost the exact opposite way I expected and have been using it! It generally means unauditable, unmonitorable, etc. and I have been talking about glass box (and sometimes white box) stylometry for AI detection whose processes are auditable, and here you are using it by analogy to airplanes to mean monitorable. Another contronym!
Hmm. A few thoughts:
1. Database engineering and confidentiality obligations has already made the machinery of state relatively difficult to survey in the 90s. The US social security database system, or its retirement processes, for instance, are insanely arcane, slow, and error prone. My guess is that we can significantly boost legibility in the coming decades with LLM, and it’s unfortunate that the first such effort was led by Musk and not a nice technocratic neoliberal.
2. You are using black-box in almost the exact opposite way I expected and have been using it! It generally means unauditable, unmonitorable, etc. and I have been talking about glass box (and sometimes white box) stylometry for AI detection whose processes are auditable, and here you are using it by analogy to airplanes to mean monitorable. Another contronym!
Yes the failures within the machinery of government are part of the recursive process that is ongoing
Yes I dislike the glassbox terminology
The idea of computer systems as black boxes goes back to the earliest days of computing. What do you see as the additional value of Humphreys?
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-History-of-the-Black-Box%3A-The-Clash-of-a-Thing-Hilgers/0ad7bda75b27913b3b41f62efc8a51d65a51b04b
It gives you a topic neutral way to talk about a recurring form of opacity.