the human is not the innocent baseline

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

The Human Is Not the Innocent Baseline rejects comparisons that set actual automated decisions against an idealized, attentive and unbiased human official. Human administration already contains prejudice, noise and evasions of responsibility; rules and models can sometimes constrain them. The relevant comparison concerns which judgments are removed, what can correct what remains, and how affected people can contest outcomes.

Explanation

AB confines the concession to administrative decision-making. It does not withdraw the separate argument that AI becomes a milieu of meaning. Automation can make discrimination inspectable and consistency possible, while relocating discretion into targets, data fields, thresholds and permissions to challenge an output.

RB3 expands the comparison through six changes in the organization of judgment, including correlated errors, selective adherence and differing institutional protocols. Its reported cases support a conditional design principle: constrain arbitrary discretion and preserve judgment carrying knowledge absent from the record. They are not a general verdict that either humans or machines perform better.

An official remaining in the loop is therefore insufficient. The exit must work in practice, and correction must reach the institutional choices that make a technical recommendation binding.

Scope and attribution

Retain the inherited subentry recommendation; AB and RB3 supply direct argument. Native empirical references remain source reports.

AB — The Actual Book

The administrative baseline concession preserves the separate milieu-of-meaning argument and shifts attention to correction and exit.

Occurrence locators: 164, 165, 166; Notes: 246, 247.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

Six displacements sharpen the conditional comparison; the central issue is which knowledge and safeguards a regime preserves.

Occurrence locators: 180, 181, 182, 183, 184.