Advisory · Broad/Dependable
The Human Still Signs
The signature stops meaning what everyone assumes: the human picked among options the system framed, and could detect few of the subtle defects. Legal responsibility and actual causal contribution quietly diverge while the law keeps pretending they coincide — a human name on every decision, almost none of the control that name implies. If sign-off were treated as a real control surface, with teeth, this corner could run broad capability with a genuine veto intact. Mostly, it isn't.
Signs it's emerging
A regulator or professional body accepts named human sign-off while permitting AI-generated work at a volume no named reviewer could inspect
The legal form of human control would have survived after the practical capacity to exercise it disappeared. — Review cadence: yearly.
An organisation reports a negligible human override rate while continuing to describe the workflow as human-decided
A signature without exercised disagreement is evidence that advice has become delegation by deference. — Review cadence: yearly.
Signs it isn't
- Reviewers get protected time, access to the underlying evidence, and real pause-and-override authority — and measured override rates show that they use it.
- Liability follows causal control to the vendor, operator, or system deployer instead of defaulting to the person whose name appears last.