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Defying the Data Priests
Crawford's 2021 Senate testimony naming algorithmic governance as a new priesthood — concentrating power in those who mediate between the public and algorithmic processes the public cannot inspect.
Defying the Data Priests is the published version of Crawford's 2021 Senate testimony on algorithmic governance. The testimony argues that AI's inscrutability creates a new form of unaccountable power — what Crawford calls a priesthood that "peers into a hidden layer of reality that is revealed only by a self-taught AI program, the logic of which is beyond human knowing." The priesthood metaphor is not rhetorical flourish. It is a precise description of the structural position data scientists and AI engineers occupy: mediators between the public and a process the public cannot access directly, whose authority derives from their privileged relationship to an opaque source of truth.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The priest analogy illuminates several features of the AI-governance situation. A priest mediates between the laity and a reality the laity cannot access directly — the divine, in religious contexts. The data scientist mediates between the public and the algorithmic process the public cannot inspect or evaluate.