By Prof. Naomi Klineberg
In the debate over artificial intelligence, “transparency” has become the gold standard. Policymakers demand that algorithms reveal how they make decisions. Advocates insist that citizens have a right to know why a loan was denied or a parole application rejected. Yet beneath this demand lies a deeper, less examined question: should our priority be exposing the workings of machines—or protecting the opacity of human lives?
The Case for Transparency
The appeal of transparency is intuitive. Democracies flourish when decisions can be scrutinized. If an algorithm allocates scarce healthcare resources, the public should know the logic behind it. Transparency promises fairness, accountability, and the ability to challenge errors.
But here is the paradox: most people do not, in practice, want to live under the constant gaze of algorithmic explanation. Do we really want every credit score, medical triage, or policing tool to render its judgment in intricate detail? Or do we risk drowning in rationalizations that explain everything but resolve nothing?
The Right to Obscurity
Perhaps the more radical demand is not transparency for algorithms, but obscurity for citizens. The ability to vanish from a dataset, to escape profiling, to remain unmodeled—is this not a form of freedom?
Consider Europe’s “right to be forgotten,” which allows individuals to demand the erasure of personal data. This is not transparency but concealment. It affirms that human beings retain the right to step outside of predictive systems. In a world where algorithms grow ever more intrusive, obscurity may be the more precious right.
A Philosophical Tension
So which deserves primacy: the transparency of the system or the opacity of the self? Philosophically, these goals are in tension. A fully transparent algorithm requires exhaustive data about individuals. A fully obscure citizenry cripples the possibility of transparent decision-making. We cannot have both in absolute form.
The Socratic challenge is to ask: what balance do we seek? Should transparency apply to the powerful—governments, corporations—while obscurity is preserved for the vulnerable? Or must we accept that some decisions will remain partly inscrutable, in order to protect the deeper privacy of human life?
Reframing the Debate
Perhaps we have asked the wrong question. It is not simply: “How do we make algorithms transparent?” but: “How do we preserve the dignity of human beings in a world of transparent machines?”
The distinction matters. Transparency is a tool, not a virtue in itself. Without the counterweight of obscurity, it risks turning citizens into glass figures—forever legible, never free to withdraw.
In an age of algorithmic governance, the most urgent demand may not be to see more clearly into the machine, but to allow the human being, at least sometimes, to remain unseen.
