Accountability Labour
Accountability labour is the human responsibility to stand behind a choice and accept the fallout if things go wrong. It is like being the captain of a ship; even if you use a computer to navigate, you are the one who has to answer for where the ship ends up, because you cannot blame the machine when a mistake happens.
Accountability labour is the non-delegable task of owning a decision and its subsequent outcomes. While AI can perform the epistemic labour of processing data and suggesting actions, the human operator must retain the final authority to execute the decision and bear the professional or legal consequences, as accountability cannot be offloaded to an automated system.
Presence-bound work: owning a decision, bearing its consequence, defending it after failure. The only durable human monopoly, non-delegable because no jurisdiction accepts 'the AI decided'. Distinct from epistemic labour (knowing) by delegability. (C4AIL, Whitepaper II §2.1.)