Who Gets the Veto? Allocate AI Authority to the Costlier Error
TL;DR for operators A high-stakes AI system can fail in two very different ways: it can act on something that is not true, or it can fail to act when danger is real. Those errors need not have comparable consequences. Martino Maggetti’s Reciprocal Trust and Distrust in Artificial Intelligence Systems: The Hard Problem of Regulation1 argues that this asymmetry should influence who receives final decision authority. In nuclear launch and strategic-warning settings, where a false positive could trigger catastrophic action, the paper favors protected human authority, independent corroboration, and explicit uncertainty. In reactor, chemical-process, and flight-control settings, where failing to intervene can be catastrophic, it allows for bounded AI authority through mechanisms such as non-overridable shutdown logic. ...