AI is a new wrinkle in an old trick to distance elected officials from accountability. After the electrical blackouts last week in Texas, the weather-worthines

AI is a new wrinkle in an old trick to distance elected officials from accountability. After the electrical blackouts last week in Texas, the weather-worthiness of power generation facilities was framed as a technical decision that engineers made, instead of a political decision to weigh costs and benefits of regulation. When the decision is framed this way, the public's attention is directed away from the elected officials who are supposed to be accountable, and for which we have created straightforward mechanisms of accountability. Public anger dissipates in a fog of uncertainty of how these unknown, anonymous engineers could be held accountable and what kind of accountability they should actually have. AI plays exactly the same role.