Definition
Extra work users or operators must do to behave ethically within a poorly designed system. It is the ethical share of the human subsidy: the part of people's unpaid, unlogged work that goes to keeping the system from harming someone. Moral overhead appears when the default workflow produces harm unless people add compensating care, vigilance, or documentation.
Ethotechnic design aims to move this overhead back into the system through clearer defaults, better safeguards, and funded maintenance capacity.
Burden
Hypothetical example
- Moderators manually reverse ranking decisions every day because harmful content controls are too weak at launch.
References
- Governance taxonomy · Resource