CONCEPT
Efficiency as Ethical Eraser
Alford's sharpest diagnostic: the institutional mechanism by which moral concerns are converted into efficiency problems, then dismissed as optimization failures rather than addressed as ethical imperatives.
When the engineer in You On AI's account proposed a redesign to prevent misuse, she was not told her concern was unimportant. She was told the design was less efficient and that misuse would be a user problem. These two sentences perform Alford's key institutional operation: the moral concern (a system could harm users) is translated into a technical concern (efficiency cost) and a jurisdictional concern (not our problem), both of which can be disposed of without engaging the ethical content. The operation is not cynical. The people performing it may not recognize what they are doing. The institution's native language is efficiency, and efficiency processes moral concerns by converting them into the available vocabulary — a conversion that strips the ethical charge precisely because the vocabulary has no grammar for it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The mechanism is subtler than outright suppression. Suppression requires someone to recognize the moral content and decide to ignore it. Conversion requires