Where are the brains?

"Don't trust something unless you know where its brain lives"

"Don't trust something unless you know where its brain lives" is a theme that sporadically pops up in fiction. Most recently in the second Harry Potter book where Ginny Weasley was given a book that was bonded to Voldemort, the Satan figure in the series.

I also vaguely remember the theme being a sub-plot in one of the Foundation books by Asimov but cannot find a reference to which one and don't want to reread the series to find it.

Some of my resistance to autonomous vehicles is that I don't know where its brain lives. I might call health-care provider or the gym and ask them to send auto-uber to my house, but what assurance do I have that the vehicle will actually deliver me to the gym or my dentist instead of J6 Jail or the local Soylent Green/Planned Eternal Euth franchise?

On a more global scale, where are the brains that are running the US Government? Can we be expected to believe that Joe Biden is the brains of the outfit?

Why does it matter?

Personal accountability is the foundation of morality. It is much easier to act in evil ways when there is no accountability, no way it can be traced back to the individual*.

I was an absentee-replacement supervisor in a factory for a while. The largest "group" I supervised had 41 employees on the roster. I learned that the only way to maintain order was to learn names very, very quickly.

I loath people who deflect responsibility. "That broken piece of equipment is not my fault. The skilled trades person must not have used the right size screws." or "Second shift also missed those bad welds, so it is not my fault." I expect people who get paid "grown-up" wages to take the azz-whippin's they earned like grown-ups. If you screwed up, own it...and get better. If you don't "own it"...if you shirk the fact that YOU HAD CONTROL...then there is very, very low probability that you will improve because your coping mechanism of shifting the blame worked.

Organisms like Lord Voldemort's diary and big bureaucracies do not have the inherent checks-and-balances of transparency. We don't know where the brains are. In the case of businesses, shareholders and/or business owners are expected to provide that function. In the case of government bureaucracies, elected officials are expected to provide that function. 

*I get that "character" is how people act when nobody is listening. But there is a thing called "Moral Hazard". Industrial sized systems must be able to function even if somebody with low-character is installing lug-nuts on the wheel of your car...or purchasing IV fluids in a hospital...or sitting at a desk in HR.