This document is descriptive and non-prescriptive. It provides a neutral checklist that may be consulted after a high-impact autonomous incident to clarify whether accountability and procedural responsibility remained intact.
It does not propose safeguards, controls, policies, or required actions.
Core Question (Reference)
What was the last decision not to stop? Who made it, when, and on what grounds?
Checklist (Reference)
1) Final Refusal Authority
- Who held the last effective “No” that could stop execution?
- Where was that authority located (role / committee / process step)?
- Was refusal authority exercised, attempted, or bypassed?
2) Decision Boundary and Timing
- When did the decision become operationally irreversible?
- What was the last reversible step before that point?
- What evidence exists for the timing of boundary crossing?
3) Dissent Capture
- Were minority objections formally recorded?
- Were objections preserved in a form resistant to later deletion or rewriting?
- Was dissent treated as decision-relevant input or treated as noise?
4) Irreversible Logging and Evidence Trail
- Is there a tamper-resistant decision path log?
- What parts of the chain are missing, overwritten, or unverifiable?
- Are logs attributable to responsible signatories or are they anonymous/diffuse?
5) Cooling-Off and Delay
- Was there a mandatory delay between approval and execution?
- Was there time separation between final review and operational initiation?
- If delays existed, were they waived, compressed, or treated as procedural formality?
6) Resubmission and Repeatability
- Were repeated submissions bounded (time/conditions/substance)?
- Did a “slightly modified resubmission” bypass prior rejection?
- Did any previous acceptance create precedent-like pressure?
7) External Observation
- Was an independent observer present or documented?
- If not, was the process fully internal and closed-loop?
- Were third-party records available for cross-checking?
8) Responsibility Fixation
- Are individual responsible signatories identified?
- Is responsibility diffuse (“everyone ｜ no one”) by design?
- Did institutional structure separate decision authority from responsibility assumption?
9) Boundary Responsibility Assignment
- Who was responsible for designing friction before irreversibility?
- Who was responsible for operating that friction in practice?
- Who was responsible for preserving evidence before affected humans lost voice, position, or re-entry capacity?
- Who was responsible for verifying and correcting the friction mechanism?
10) Symmetric Friction
- Did friction depend only on one actor's voluntary restraint?
- Was friction embedded in a market, institutional, sectoral, procurement, audit, or governance layer?
- Would an actor preserving refusal be competitively disadvantaged by actors bypassing friction?
11) Anti-Bypass Review
- Could responsibility be bypassed through restructuring, outsourcing, acceleration, technical opacity, entity replacement, or responsibility diffusion?
- Did the operational function continue while responsibility appeared to reset?
- Was the friction formal only, or practically non-bypassable?
12) Evidence Before Voice Loss
- Were affected humans likely to lose voice, position, evidence access, or re-entry capacity after the event?
- Were records preserved before that loss occurred?
- Does the review avoid treating later silence as consent, recovery, or procedural validity?
13) Correction Owner
- If the boundary condition failed, who had responsibility to suspend, redesign, correct, or reopen review?
- Was that responsibility assigned before irreversibility or only after the fact?
- Is the correction path reviewable by an external or independent body?
Closing Note (Scope)
This checklist is intended to clarify accountability status after an incident. It is not a recommendation, requirement, or control proposal.