There was a time when you could walk into a bank, speak to a human being, and open an account with a smile, a utility bill, and an assurance you weren’t laundering oligarch money because the manager knew you. Those were the days…
Nowadays, you apply online, upload your documents, and receive a crisp rejection letter from a machine named because your passport expires in 2 months’ time. Welcome to the age of algorithmic authority, where companies and departments are outsourcing decision-making to machines, not because they’re better, but because they don’t argue, take lunch breaks, or demand Christmas bonuses.
It starts small. You’re told your insurance claim is denied because “you didn’t post an update on your social media platofrm immediately after the incident.” You try to appeal, only to be met with a dazzling cascade of automated replies assuring you your query is important before ultimately looping you back to the original rejection. The humans are still technically there; they just lack both the access and the willpower to override “The System.”
And therein lies the problem. The machine has spoken. No one dares question the machine. Karen in Compliance used to override daft decisions, but after spending 19 hours trying to change a postcode in the new system, she gave up and now lives in a shed offgrid.
This isn’t just about annoying inefficiencies. It’s about the creeping normalisation of dehumanisation. People are increasingly being judged, rejected, penalised or profiled by machines whose inner workings are more mysterious than your aunt’s parma violet pudding. Want to rent a flat? Sorry, your “risk profile” doesn’t like the number of times you posted your location last month. Apply for a job? The CV scanner didn’t like your choice of verbs. Apply again, but this time with fewer adjectives and a more algorithm-friendly font.
At first, you laugh. Then you get locked out of your pension portal for “suspicious clicking behaviour” and the only support option is a chatbot named “Benji” who keeps asking if you’ve tried clearing your cookies. (You have. You cleared them because you’re not an idiot, but that’s all the advice Benji can offer and there is no option to pick for “speak to a human”.)
And while the machines may be cold, the humans managing them are exhausted. Frontline staff have gone from decision-makers to middlemen for robot bureaucracy. Many are too scared to question the system, lest they be flagged for “noncompliance,” or simply too worn out to keep fighting code that doesn’t care.
Where does it end? With courts sentencing people based on predictive crime models? With babies being assigned nursery placements based on “projected emotional volatility”? With you being banned from public libraries because your smart kettle shared your tea preferences with the national reading database?
Unless we start remembering that machines are tools, not judges; helpful when used wisely, dangerous when left to govern without oversight. We need to bring back the human override button, not just as a feature, but as a principle. Someone needs to be able to say, “Yes, the system says no, but common sense says yes,” without risking being sucked into the dark void of disciplinary protocols.
Because one day, you might find yourself standing outside a bank, holding your passport, your tax documents, and a perfectly reasonable expression, only to be told you’ve been denied entry for “failing to meet digital personhood threshold 7b.” And the only person who might have been able to help is Karen, but she’s actually happy in her shed, living in a machine free world…
Photo by Igor Omilaev
