Capitalism rests on a balance: it grants freedom to act, but it also imposes responsibility for the consequences of those actions.
You don’t get one without the other!
Yet increasingly, companies and public figures try to claim the upside of autonomy while outsourcing the downside. When harm occurs, the explanation shifts from agency to abstraction:
“the system failed,” “the algorithm did it,” “the machine made the decision.”
Responsibility dissolves into process.
But this move doesn’t hold up. Tools, whether simple or advanced, don’t bear moral responsibility!
The humans and organizations that design, deploy, and profit from them do.
Saying “the machine did it” is no more convincing than saying “the gun pulled its own trigger.” In both cases, the relevant question is: who created the conditions under which harm became possible, foreseeable, and profitable?
Some will argue that modern systems are too complex for any single actor to be accountable, that there is no clear “operator” in the chain of command.
But that’s not a defense, it’s an indictment.
If a system is structured in such a way that responsibility becomes untraceable, then the system itself is irresponsibly designed.
The more autonomy we build into our technologies - especially in high-stakes domains like lethal force - the stronger the obligation on manufacturers, deployers, and regulators to ensure accountability.
If an autonomous system causes harm, responsibility doesn’t vanish. And it can't be allowed to! Instead it concentrates upstream, with those who chose to create and release it.
In short: freedom to innovate includes responsibility for outcomes. If you can’t assign responsibility, you haven’t built a system worthy of that freedom