Concepts
Defined terms, with SKOS relations between them.
32 records. Review labels describe the catalogue entry, not the source’s reliability. About record status
A tour of duty in public service
A period of work inside government intended to deliver something useful and leave capability with the people who remain.
Qualified confidenceAccountability gap
A gap between the people or organisations responsible for an AI system and effective ways to make them answer for its effects.
Qualified confidenceAdaptive reuse
Extending the life of an existing building or structure by transforming it for continued or new use instead of demolishing and replacing it.
Qualified confidenceAttractor state
A set of states towards which nearby trajectories of a dynamical system tend.
Qualified confidenceBias to action
A preference for trying a bounded, useful intervention and learning from its results, rather than waiting indefinitely for a complete plan.
Qualified confidenceCodification
Organising a body of law into a systematic code; its legal effect depends on the enactment and jurisdiction.
Qualified confidenceDog law
Bentham’s polemical comparison of retrospective judge-made rules to punishing a dog without first announcing the rule.
High confidenceGreen gentrification
Gentrification associated with new or improved green space, in which rising rents and changing populations follow the greening of a neighbourhood.
Qualified confidenceHigh modernism
In Scott’s account, a strong faith in scientific and technical planning as a means to redesign social life.
Qualified confidenceInstitutional learning
How an organisation retains and applies experience through its people, working relationships and shared practices.
Qualified confidenceInteroperability
The ability of systems to exchange information and work together through shared interfaces and standards.
Qualified confidenceLearned helplessness
Used in this essay for the expectation that taking initiative will not change an institutional outcome.
Qualified confidenceLegibility
Making people, places or rules easier to represent and administer through standardised categories and records.
Qualified confidenceLegislative debt
The essay’s analogy for the work created when accumulated legal changes make the current law harder to establish.
Qualified confidenceMachine-readable law
Legal material published in a structured format that software can identify and process.
High confidenceMaintenance
The continuing work and funding needed to keep a building, service or place in use, as distinct from the one-off work of creating it.
Qualified confidenceMechanistic interpretability
Research that investigates internal model mechanisms to explain particular behaviours.
High confidenceNeo-technocracy
The technocratic ambition, to run society by measurement and engineering rather than argument, pursued through infrastructure that is privately built but publicly depended on, by people whose authority comes from what they build rather than from office or expertise.
Qualified confidenceNetwork state
An online community aligned enough to act collectively that seeks territory around the world and eventually diplomatic recognition from existing states.
Qualified confidencePersistent identity
Continuity of an AI system across restarts, copies and updates, and how that continuity is documented.
Qualified confidenceState capacity
The ability of public institutions to put decisions into practice and deliver services.
Qualified confidenceStochastic parrots
A critique arguing that fluent language-model output should not be equated with grounded meaning or understanding.
Qualified confidenceSurveillance capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff's term for an economic order that claims human experience as raw material for behavioural data, prediction and influence.
Qualified confidence
Swiss cheese model
Reason’s model of accidents passing through weaknesses in multiple layers of defence.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Davidmack · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Technical debt
Cunningham’s metaphor for future development costs incurred when software is shipped before its design is fully consolidated.
High confidenceTechno-feudalism
The argument that digital platforms have replaced markets with rent-extracting fiefdoms, so that profit gives way to rent and users stand to platforms as serfs to lords.
Qualified confidenceTechnocracy
Government, or the aspiration to government, by technical experts applying measurement and engineering in place of political argument.
Qualified confidenceThe knowing-doing gap
The gap between stating or planning an action and carrying it out; applied here to agents’ recorded plans.
Qualified confidenceThe sensorium effect
The essay’s term for how an agent’s observations and tools constrain what it notices and acts on.
Qualified confidenceThe state as a work of art
Burckhardt’s interpretation of Renaissance Italian statecraft as conscious political construction.
High confidenceViable System Model
Beer’s recursive model of the functions an organisation needs to remain viable in a changing environment.
High confidence
