AI judgment
The book focuses on the automation of evaluative work once performed by human supervisors.
The System Is the Boss
How AI, Bad Data, and Broken Metrics Are Reshaping Work
A work of narrative nonfiction and management criticism about how systems, algorithms, metrics, and AI are becoming the authority inside modern organizations.
The argument
In modern organizations, the system itself has become the actual authority. Not the CEO, not the regional VP, and not the floor manager with years of institutional knowledge. The decisions that govern workers’ lives are increasingly made by metrics, algorithms, and artificial intelligence systems that no individual designed end-to-end and no individual can fully override.
The supervisor who disagrees with the outcome enforces it anyway. The manager who knows the model is wrong follows it anyway. The system does not require their belief. It only requires their participation.
Bad data
It challenges the habit of treating flawed data systems as neutral and objective.
Accountability
It asks who is responsible when authority moves into systems nobody can fully challenge.