System Evaluation and Delivery

A central question in system delivery revolves around how much the user surrenders his or her own judgment and accountability to the expert, human or computer, and how much the user retains. This is an extremely important philosophical question with profound social and legal implications. The issue has not been forced to the forefront before now because conventional computer programs have been used primarily to report objective results based on algorithms that can be validated for accuracy against the real world. Interpretation of factual results and any potential actions suggested by the results have usually been left up to the judgment of the user. We customarily hold humans accountable for their actions based on their judgments.