Calculated inefficiency: sustaining human supervisory competence as an ethical design objective for hybrid human-AI systems

Abstract

The ethics of human oversight over artificial intelligence systems has been articulated at length as a normative requirement, most notably in Article 14 of the EU AI Act and in the philosophical literature on meaningful human control. Far less attention has been paid to the organisational question that determines whether such oversight is substantive or nominal: how the human competence on which oversight depends is sustained over time, in environments where the practice opportunities that historically reproduced it have been absorbed by the machine. This paper develops the construct of calculated inefficiency, defined as the structural property of a hybrid information system in which human interventions in automatable processes are maintained at levels above what pure efficiency optimisation would select, regardless of whether that maintenance was deliberately architected or emerged from other organisational sources. Whether such arrangements actually sustain or improve supervisory competence is treated as a separate empirical question. We distinguish three types of calculated inefficiency (architected, institutional, residual), formalise a four-dimensional hybrid-resilience framework (verifiability, distributed competence, decision traceability, systemic robustness) as a threshold weakest-link specification for hybrid resilience, and develop eight theoretical propositions, organised under seven proposition labels (P1, P2, P3a, P3b, P4, P5, P6, P7), that operationalise the construct at empirically testable scope. We engage three counter-positions, including the simulation-based competence reserve and the specialised recovery unit, and we specify the political-economy mechanisms (regulatory pre-commitment, insurance linkage, audit-trail requirements) through which the construct can be protected from short-term efficiency pressures. The contribution is to translate the ethical imperative of meaningful human control into an architectural and institutional design object that organisations can adopt, regulators can audit, and researchers can measure.