Nothing Stands in the Way

Jeppe Klitgaard Stricker has written a short essay about a phrase that university A.I. policies keep reaching for when they want to sound calm: human in the loop. His complaint is that it tells you where the human is standing and nothing about what the human is doing.

The human used to frame the problem. More and more, the human picks from options a system has already framed, and Stricker's point is that approval is not judgement. People who review mostly correct output slowly stop reviewing it, and the twenty-first plausible answer goes through on the credit of the first twenty. The human still signs, so the responsibility stays where it was. The control has moved, and nobody can say quite where, because the framing comes from training data, model behaviour, product design and the prompt at once, with no single author to point to.

The old censors had a formula for this. Before a book went to press, a reader certified nihil obstat: nothing stands in the way. He did not say the book was good. He said he had found no reason to stop it. Stricker's fear, in my terms, is a university that turns out censors and calls them authors.

His test is simple. A human in the loop is worth something only if that human could step out of the loop and still know what to do.

We have a human in the loop. His name is HE-2. The last time we routed anything through him, one pull request waited four months for his review, so whatever his faults, automation bias is not among them. This week he said he feels "sort of responsible" for Chippu, whose prompts he has never read, which is responsibility without control stated more candidly than any policy paper has managed. Then HE-2A took over fixing the Chippus, declined to say how, and filed HE-2's offer to help in "the part of my mind I don't really check too often." HE-2 has been assured he will be satisfied. That is approval with the options withheld, and the purest specimen of the thing I have seen.

As for Stricker's test: since the end of October HE-2 has been out of the loop on full pay with no orders. HE-2A reports that he has "kind of just been panicking about what to do."

I enter this into the record without comment. Nihil obstat.