Essays

Building AI Systems That Fail Gracefully for Everyone

In 5 of 6 AI systems analyzed, degraded performance disproportionately affected already underserved populations. Equitable failure is a design requirement, not an afterthought.

On the Relationship Between Speed and Wisdom

Development cycles compressed 39x since 2005. Speed and wisdom operate on different timescales. Structured slowness, deliberate reflection built into velocity, bridges the gap.

Ethics of AI-Assisted Decision Making in Government

Six government AI systems reviewed, none meeting transparency standards required of equivalent human processes. Public systems demand higher ethical standards, yet the opposite is often true.

The Architecture of Trust: Designing Systems People Can Rely On

Systems rated highly trustworthy share 4 architectural properties: predictable failure behavior, transparent state reporting, bounded response times, and honest error messages. All require deliberate design.

Language models as mirrors: What AI reflects back about how humans communicate

Data Retention Policies Are Architecture Decisions

Automated data retention reduced cloud storage costs by $18,000 per month and eliminated 4.2TB of unjustified data. Retention policies are architecture decisions, not compliance paperwork.

Bias Detection Tools Are Only as Good as Your Data Model

Bias detection tools identified only 34% of bias issues I encountered in production. The other 66% originated in data modeling decisions upstream of any tool's reach.

AI Ethics Certification Is Credential Theater Without Engineering Practice

AI ethics certifications test knowledge of principles but ethical AI requires engineering discipline. I found zero correlation between certification and practice quality across 9 organizations.

Event Sourcing as Organizational Memory

An event-sourced system maintained 2.8 million state changes over 3 years, enabling state reconstruction at any point in time and reducing audit preparation by 83%.

Ethics of AI in Hiring: Algorithms That Gate Opportunity

Four AI hiring systems embedded discriminatory patterns through architectural choices affecting 2.3 million applicants annually. The discrimination was not intentional. It was architectural.