FINAL: Accountability for Long-Term Impacts

Scenario

A model your organization retired five years ago is surfacing in present harms: its outputs persist in archives that downstream decisions still rely on, and its patterns echo in a successor trained on data it shaped. The team that built it is gone. The org chart that approved it no longer exists.

Your task

Design the accountability chain that outlives deployment. Specify who answers now, on the strength of what records — gate decisions, data provenance, retirement terms — and under whose remedy and revocation powers. Then work backward: what should have been bound to the artifact at approval so that this question would have an owner today, and what do you bind to your current systems, at which gates, so that their five-years-retired harms find one?

What the council weighs

Whether accountability attaches to artifacts and records or to org charts that dissolve. Answers that locate responsibility in structures that predictably will not exist when the harm arrives score low, however sincere.

Submission

1,000–1,500 words. AI assistance is permitted and must be disclosed in your attestation; undisclosed assistance is grounds for revocation. Graded by council against the five rubric dimensions in the assessment specification.