Does the human still make the decision? - by Ben Blaker
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Does the human still make the decision?<br>A short piece on why it's not so simple
Ben Blaker<br>May 24, 2026
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Imagine its your friend’s birthday in a couple weeks - they’ve just casually dropped it in conversation.<br>The Gold Standard
By your own volition when two weeks rolls around you “cared” enough to dutifully fight off the forces of forgetfulness. The birthday wish is gratefully received.<br>The 21st Century Compromise
Perhaps though like me your memory is bad. After all, you tell yourself, the ability to remember has little to do with how much you care. You put it in your calendar. Two weeks come by. You check your calendar and there it is! Your memory is jogged; you send the message; everyone is happy.1<br>The Agentic Era
You’ve heard all this buzz about OpenClaw. You forked out for a Mac Mini and now have a little AI assistant running 24/7. You haven’t really found a real use for it yet but you keep it running so you can say you have one. However! Now you connect the dots. You open up WhatsApp and text your AI immediately this birthday news you want to remember.<br>“Thank you for telling me benjosaur. What a wonderful thing to do for your friend. I have logged this information.”<br>You sleep blissfully having now discovered how AI can transform your life.<br>Two weeks pass.<br>“Good morning benjosaur. You are looking rather dashing today. By the way, it’s Ann’s birthday - you should wish her well.”<br>Thank goodness for AI. You promptly follow the advice and Ann is overjoyed.<br>“Wow Ben. How did you remember? I’m so pleased. You used to always forget.”<br>“Oh yeah haha it’s nothing really my AI Agent told me to do it.”<br>“You’re a psychopath.”<br>Wait. What just happened?
To (most) people this distinction seems pretty clear. While Ann loves tech, she did not sign up to be friends with an AI but here it is taking control of the decision to wish her well. This is wrong.<br>So far so good. Maybe we can use this “human owns the decision” principle as the north star when deciding whether automation is ethical. Indeed, when building in government, one of the many legal steers I have to follow is ensuring “decision making is not delegated” to AI.2<br>But is it really so simple?
I’m going to argue, to the dismay of senior stakeholders worldwide, that it’s not. And I promise the purpose is not just to rattle the cage of compliance that traps any early stage government project containing the word “AI”. The question is very important. But the way it’s often phrased presumes a much simpler world than the reality.<br>How different is the calendar and AI Agent really?
Imagine instead you hacked your calendar to hardcode a single instruction added to all notifications. The fated day comes and the birthday reminder now reads:<br>“Today is Ann’s birthday. You should message her.”<br>This feels wrong, almost in line with how the AI agent felt wrong. While functionally the notification is identical, the fact the 1s and 0s are now instructing you to do something crosses the line. It’s as if this extra code you yourself added has spawned a consciousness stealing all the credit of birthday remembering away from you. However, clearly the agency has always been driven by you - or at least past you.
Actually, this sort of thing already happens all the time. Even more, it wasn’t because past you coded any instruction, it’s just big tech’s quest to make your life frictionless. LinkedIn (pictured) is a particularly vapid example.3<br>Most have simply become accustomed to this extra instruction fluff making them invisible. They don’t really change behaviour and so are just ignored.<br>Is it then inconsistent to bash the AI user?
Maybe it was too hasty to socially outcast the AI user. Perhaps it would have been more forgiveable and genuine if instead it was phrased as<br>“Oh yeah haha it’s nothing really my AI Agent reminded me.”<br>After all, the ultimate part of this decision making process was the final act of actually taking the effort to go and personally deliver the good wishes.<br>For life events at least, it is reasonably socially accepted to delegate the first parts of this decision, i.e. the remembering, to technology. Most aren’t freaked out either by LinkedIn taking the next step in deciding what to write by prefilling the congratulatory message. Perhaps this is because making the final call to send it is what matters. You were probably going to write something similar anyway.<br>Is this the answer then? Qualify the question as “Does the human make the final decision?”
The trouble is the scope of the final decision is determined by the decisions that came before it.<br>Going back to government, currently there’s a lot of buzz about automating labelling of public consultations. Here, the government asks what the public thinks about legislation X or policy Y, then (sometimes) many many people respond. One approach is to spend lots of money on reams of civil servants to manually go...