Terms the series defines, in the order the argument builds them.
- Operational accountability
- The discipline of defining what a machine-mediated judgment is permitted and required to do, creating the conditions in which those obligations can be met, preserving sufficient evidence to assess the judgment afterward, and reassessing the arrangement as conditions change.
- Machine-mediated judgment
- A judgment produced or materially shaped by computational inference, whether its result acts directly or informs a human decision.
- Bounded function
- A discrete unit of inference within an operational workflow. Its contract defines the judgment it makes, the context and reasoning basis that judgment requires, the data and tools it may access, the effects it is authorized to cause, the evidence it must produce, and how it behaves when conditions degrade.
- Meaningful human control
- A human decision point at which the person has the information, time, authority, and effective means to challenge, reject, or stop an outcome. A recorded approval alone does not establish meaningful control. (One possible obligation of a bounded function — not what makes something a bounded function.)
- Evidence debt
- The gap between what a function must prove and what its implementation can actually produce.
- Completeness vs sufficiency
- Completeness asks whether the required fields or events are present. Sufficiency asks whether the record contains enough evidence for the obligation. A complete record does not establish that the decision was right.
- Decision BOM (DBOM)
- A per-decision record of what produced an outcome: the model and prompt versions, the data consulted, the tools invoked, the policies in force, the human actions taken.
- The placement contract
- Each bounded inference function declares what a valid judgment requires; each execution environment declares what it can provide and enable. The pairing is the contract.
- The evidence plane
- The systems that produce proof as a byproduct of doing their work: enforcement points that emit logs, policy engines that record their grants, attestation services.
- Function / placement / authority
- Three independent axes: what the function does, where it runs, and what it is permitted to decide or cause.