Court of Review Sets Aside a Grid Curtailment Signed by No One
A winter transmission cut recommended by a scheduling model and approved by no named officer cannot stand, the court held — the first test of Human Command at the Backbone.
The Court of Review on Thursday set aside a transmission curtailment that had darkened part of the Inland North for six hours during a cold snap, ruling that the order failed the Republic’s first law of machines: a human must answer for it.
The curtailment had been generated by a grid-balancing model inside the Backbone and executed automatically when no operator intervened in time. When a citizens’ cooperative in the Spokane corridor asked who had ordered their power cut, the Backbone Authority could not produce a name. The model had decided; the people had complied; no officer had answered.
An efficient outcome reached by an unanswerable process is still a failure of self-government.— Court of Review, in the panel’s opinion
Not a ban on machines
The court was careful to say what it was not deciding. It did not forbid the grid model, nor question that the curtailment may have been, in raw engineering terms, the correct call to keep the wider network from collapsing. Human Command, the panel wrote, “is not a prohibition on advice from machines. It is a prohibition on consequence without a human author.”
What the order lacked was that author. Because no named officer had reviewed and signed the curtailment, there was no one a citizen could petition, no one the Assembly could summon, no one whose judgment was on the public record. The decision was, in the court’s phrase, “orphaned” — and an orphaned decision cannot bind a free person.
Thirty days to a name
The Backbone Authority was ordered to route every curtailment through a named duty officer within thirty days, and to log that officer’s identity and reasoning in the public status record. The model may still propose; a person must dispose, and must do so where the public can see the disposition.
A machine may recommend. A consequential action against a citizen requires a named human who reviewed it and can be asked to answer. No name, no order.
The cooperative that brought the petition asked for no damages, only the name. “We were not angry that the lights went out,” its steward said outside the court. “We were angry that no one would say they turned them off.” Under the ruling, next time someone will.