How Ethotechnics works
Ethotechnics governs system failure, not intent.
It provides operational artifacts that make decisions reversible, assign ownership
under pressure, and cap the burden placed on affected users.
The three lenses
Apply one lens at a time to a single workflow. Each has a question and an example.
Burden accounting
Track hidden labor: triage, rework, apology loops, policy exceptions.
A health plan's AI triage tool misroutes 12% of prior auths. Nurses spend 90 minutes per shift re-routing them. That's 7.5 hours of unpaid care-time per week per nurse. Burden accounting surfaces that cost.
Infrastructure dignity
Does the system preserve operator agency and user recourse under pressure?
A clinical chatbot gives a wrong dosing recommendation. The nurse cannot override it without calling a supervisor who is in a meeting. Infrastructure dignity asks: where is the override, and can the operator reach it in 30 seconds?
Care-time economics
What is the tradeoff between shipping velocity and long-term maintenance extraction?
Engineering ships a model update that cuts false positives by 3% but adds 45 minutes of daily review work for the care management team. Care-time economics asks whether that tradeoff was visible before the deploy.
Application sequence
- Select a workflow. Choose a process where system decisions affect people (triage, prior authorization, customer escalation).
- Map burden by role. Follow one decision from initiation to resolution. Document each instance where a person compensates for or overrides the system.
- Apply one lens. Choose the lens that best fits the pressure point in the workflow. Adapt the example pattern to the context.
- Share the analysis. Present the lens analysis to a decision-maker. The pattern is designed to communicate in a single conversation.
Repeat for a different workflow or lens each week. Three weeks produces a cross-section of burden distribution across the system.