Oded Balaban

Every time we say “the algorithm decided,” a human decision—and whoever made it—vanishes.

Oded Balaban — University of Haifa — balaban@research.haifa.ac.il

There is a phrase heard in more and more places, and it always performs the same magic trick: “the algorithm decided.” We hear it when a bank denies a loan, when a program discards a résumé no human eye ever reads, when a court sets bail by a “risk score,” when a government accuses thousands of families of fraud because an automated system flagged them. And we hear it, increasingly, in war. I write from the Middle East, where drones are part of the everyday sky and where artificial-intelligence systems already help choose whom to watch and whom to strike. In every case the trick is the same: a human decision is made, and its author disappears.

Start with the verb that holds it all up: “to decide.” The system, we are told, “chose.” But for a machine, choosing is not deciding: it is executing a rule. If this pattern appears, then this action. The “if” and the “then” were written by a person; the machine merely fills in the last variable. Filling the blank in a rule someone else wrote is not making a decision—it is the rule running. Whoever that rule leaves without credit, without a job, without freedom or without life was not condemned by an intelligence that resolved to condemn them. They were condemned by a rule, and rules have authors.

One replies: but no one programmed the system against that particular person; there was no name. True—and it changes nothing. A general who orders “fire on anyone who crosses that bridge” names no one either, and no one thinks to say he did not take part in those deaths. Not naming the victim is not the absence of a decision: it is a decision of another kind—a general order. Delegating the last step to a machine changes the mechanism, not the author.

Beneath all this lies a deeper confusion: the one that lends the machine a soul it does not have. To decide, to want, to awaken are things of a being with something at stake. The machine has nothing at stake. It values nothing, fears nothing, desires nothing; that is why it can neither obey out of loyalty nor rebel out of will. It is a tool—a very fast, literal one, but a tool. A land mine, too, “acts without human control”: it waits, and kills whoever steps on it. We never granted the mine a soul; we blamed the one who buried it. The autonomous system is a smarter mine: its intelligence is in the aiming, not in the wanting.

Why insist on this so much? Because the story of the machine that “decides” turns our attention toward the device and away from the one place where the responsible party lives: the person who designed it, trained it and let it loose. “It was the algorithm” is the perfect alibi. The machine’s autonomy becomes a moral firewall: if the machine decided, no human decided, and there is no one to judge. That—not the robot with a will of its own—is the real dystopia: human beings who harm, exclude or kill and who, having handed the last step to a program, remain, and feel, innocent. What is new is not a will in the machine; it is the industrial dissolution of human responsibility.

There is a final, uncomfortable turn. When the machine produces a monstrous result, we recoil as if a dark mind had surfaced. But what surfaces is ours: it was trained on us, it executes our specifications, it returns our own criteria without the filter a person of conscience would apply. The horror we attribute to its awakening is the horror of our own purposes, amplified and unchecked. The machine does not dream of harming us. It does not dream. It only does, with judgment-free obedience, exactly what we asked.

So yes: there are reasons to fear these machines. But we must name the fear correctly. The danger is not that the machine will want; it is that it will act without wanting—precise, tireless, cheap—whatever a human being specifies, while everyone points at the device and no one at himself. Let us not look to the sky, or to the screen, for a subject that is awakening. Let us look at the hand that wrote the rule and pressed the button. The one responsible was never inside the machine. It was, as always, one of us.