Access Classes & Routing Rights
RESEARCH PROGRAMME — Governance. Grounded in the present and in dated, citable evidence.
Access Classes & Routing Rights
This programme studies how AI systems sort people — into classes that determine what they see, what they are offered, and which queue they land in — and what rights a person should have to know they were routed, to contest it, and to be routed differently. Long before any formal decision, a system has often already ranked, scored, filtered, or priced a person. This programme is about that quieter layer, and the accountability it usually escapes.
Most decisions are never experienced as a “no.” A person is simply not shown, not prioritised, or sorted into a class they never see — a higher price, an application that never reached a human, help that went to someone else first. The routing is invisible by default, because disclosing it invites friction and hiding it costs nothing. This programme treats routing as a governance object in its own right: if an automated step materially shapes what a person can access, they should be told clearly enough, and given a route real enough, that they could actually contest it. Notice that leads nowhere is form without force.
How it connects. This is the citizen-facing edge of the admissibility method: admissibility asks whether a system may enter a decision; routing rights ask what the person on the other end can see and challenge once it has. See What Is Admissibility? for the method, and the Right to Know You Were Routed signpost for how to read this from the outside.
Work in this programme
- Can You Opt Out of Automated Decisions? — what opting out does and does not mean when routing precedes the formal decision.
- Colorado’s SB 189 — a live regime built almost entirely on this layer: notice, adverse-outcome disclosure, correction, and human review (primary home: Admissibility & Evidence; central to this programme’s evidence).
- Related reading in the Futures strand: the Right to Know You Were Routed signpost.
- Themes developed at book length: being routed differently, the citizen as case and risk object, and pricing that anticipates you (see Books).
What we are working toward. A workable standard for meaningful routing notice (specific, conspicuous, and tied to a real appeal); the boundary between legitimate opacity and convenient invisibility; and what a right to be routed differently would require in practice.
