[sevensor]

The dream of decision-making machines has been with us for 70 years, since Wiener wrote Cybernetics in the '40s, but it keeps falling flat. Ultimately, computers remain a tool, no matter how sophisticated, and they will never be capable of reason. Tasked with implementing a policy, they will implement it deterministically, based only on the available input data, without judgment or context. You may implement a very complicated policy by training an artificial neural network, but that doesn't make it any less deterministic or provide it with powers of reason. It just means that you've succeeded in creating a policy you don't understand.

As for bureaucrats, like everyone I've had my share of bad experiences. But it's just not the case that they're uniformly bad. If you've ever had an airline agent find a creative way to get you on a flight, or a doctor prescribe medicine for a needed off-label use, or someone at the motor vehicle department decide you don't need to fill that form out again, you've seen human judgement and context in action. Even bad bureaucracies have good bureaucrats sometimes.

[parasubvert]

What is reason, beyond sensing, sense-making, logic, verification of facts/premises, and response/conclusion?

Computers absolutely will be (and are today!) capable of reason - but as with humans it will be limited and imperfect - just in different ways than humans. Having worked in the semantic web space for example, some logical inferences are computationally way too expensive to bother with, and a human will often be better. Other cases are better. Research on building reasoning systems for medical diagnosis , prescription and contra-indication are getting very sophisticated for example.

I suspect what computers will long be bad at are imagination, curiosity, ambition, emotion, and intuition... All of which relate to your examples of weaving through the bureaucracy.