Being stonewalled by bureaucracy with no explanation given is nothing new.
[1] The meetings that people who rant about faceless bureaucrats never show up at.
... woman inherits the Earth?
I think the mortgage derivative swaps crisis taught us that. Powerful fools are still fools, and there's nothing about the system as-is that prevents some fools from becoming powerful.
In that sense, it's entirely possible we have bad outcomes from automated systems created by people who don't understand them. And that's the ambivalent case.
The actively evil case is: "How much would I have to pay you to design an unethical automated system?"
But actions your automated systems are still your actions, regardless of intentions and outcomes. If we hold people responsible for negligently causing damage, we should also hold them responsible for negligently causing damage using an automated system. And of course, we should positive outcomes a system causes to the people behind it as well.