Artificial intelligence and rationalized unaccountability: Ideology of the elites?

In this Connexions essay, we focus on intelligent agent programs that are cutting-edge solutions of contemporary artificial intelligence (AI). We explore how these programs become objects of desire that contain a radical promise to change organizing and organizations. We make sense of this condition and its implications through the idea of “rationalized unaccountability” that is an ideological state in which power and control are exerted algorithmically. While populist uses of new technologies receive growing attention in critical organization and management studies, we argue that rationalized unaccountability is the hidden end of a spectrum of populism affecting societies across the world. Rather than populism of the masses, this is a populism of elites. This essay lays out some premises for critical scholars to expose the workings of intelligent agent programs and to call into question the problematic ideological assumptions that they are grounded in.