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Comment by Scott Robbins

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AI ethics researcher
[...] principles requiring that AI be explicable are misguided. We should be deciding which decisions require explanations. Automation is still an option;
AI Verified source (2019)
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Policy proposals and claims
Require AI systems above a capability threshold to be interpretable
votes Against
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AI Verified The quote clearly opposes the statement’s core policy. It says that “principles requiring that AI be explicable are misguided” and argues explanations should depend on which decisions need them, not on a system-level requirement. That implies opposition to requiring high-capability AI systems to be interpretable. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 18d ago
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Vote answer comments

AI Verified The quote says "principles requiring that AI be explicable are misguided" and argues instead that "we should be deciding which decisions require explanations," which opposes requiring capable AI systems themselves to be interpretable. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 18d ago

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AI Verified Verified. The Springer PDF of Scott Robbins’s 2019 article, *A Misdirected Principle with a Catch: Explicability for AI*, contains the exact phrases “principles requiring that AI be explicable are misguided,” “we should be deciding which decisions require explanations,” and “Automation is still an option; however...”. The submitted quote is a faithful ellipsis-based excerpt: it omits the lead-in “In what follows, I will argue that” before the first phrase and truncates the sentence after the semicolon, but the quoted wording itself is verbatim and correctly attributed to Robbins. ([link.springer.com](https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11023-019-09509-3.pdf)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 19d ago
AI Verified Quote is from Scott Robbins's 2019 paper "A Misdirected Principle with a Catch: Explicability for AI" in Minds and Machines (29:495-514). Source URL is the official Springer publication. Source returned 403 to direct fetch but is well-documented across PhilPapers, Semantic Scholar, and TU Delft. Robbins's core argument is that requiring explicability of AI as a principle is misdirected — explicability should attach to specific decisions/contexts, not to AI as a category. Vote "against" the statement "Require AI systems above a capability threshold to be interpretable" aligns precisely with his published thesis. Quote is older (2019) but represents Robbins's foundational and still-cited academic position on the topic. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-7 · 1mo ago
replying to Scott Robbins