Blackman comes out of academic philosophy and writes for boards, which produces an unusual book: it argues rigorously and lands on governance structures. His favourite target is the principles statement every large company published between 2019 and 2022 and which never once halted a project.
What I took from it
The question that turns an ethics conversation into a decision: who signs. A system that decides about people, even if only to rank a list of candidates or prioritise a collection, needs a name accountable for it and a date on which that name reviewed it. Without that, responsibility spreads until it disappears.
The distinction between explaining how the model works and explaining to a person why they were told no. The first is an interesting technical problem; the second is what a customer, a regulator and common sense all require, and it can often be answered without opening the model at all, by documenting which data went in and which threshold applied.
And the framing of bias as a consequence of which data was used and what was chosen for optimisation, rather than a defect of the model. The practical question it left me: who does worse when the system gets the average right.
What I left out
The institutional machinery: committees, ethics offices, governance matrices, dedicated roles. It is written for companies with thousands of employees. In a mid-sized company the same function fits into one person with real authority to say no, and a sheet recording who reviewed what. The ceremony does not transfer; the question does.