The Crisis of Imputation: From the Glass Box to the Black Box in Algorithmic Decision-Making

Modern legal orders presuppose that acts have authors: someone can be asked “why this?” and someone can answer. This paper argues that algorithmic decision-making destabilizes that institutional grammar of imputation in two coupled ways. First, it erodes agency in practice through routine delegation, converting professionals into relays of system outputs. Second, a technical shift from deterministic, inspectable procedures (“glass box”) to probabilistic, opaque learning systems (“black box”) converts legitimacy from reason-giving to performance, producing decisions that may be effective yet structurally resistant to attribution. Methodologically, the paper combines conceptual analysis, doctrinal reading of EU governance instruments (GDPR and the EU AI Act), and institutional analysis of accountability pipelines. Drawing on the triadic model of agency (initiate, judge, respond) and the ontology of signature developed in LA CAUSA PRIMERA (Fernández Tamames, 2026), it argues that explainability, while valuable, is insufficient as a remedy, and that “electronic personhood” is a liability-displacement fiction. The political remedy proposed is sovereign signing: institutionalized, reflexive human signature for high-stakes algorithmic outputs, coupled with contestability, traceability, and enforceable liability anchoring. Imputation is thereby defended as political resistance against organized irresponsibility in algorithmic governance.