The Machine Fired Me

A store chain that comes to mind as getting this right is Publix, a grocery store chain in the southeastern US. Aside from a policy of giving the customer any item that rings up at a higher price than is shown on the shelf free of charge, the cashier can generally overrule the computer if something is unreasonable. I'm sure these things get flagged for review by a manager, but in the moment, the cashier is empowered to fix the problem for the customer. I've had other stores tell me they couldn't sell me an item at all because the computer said it was a two-pack and the store only had a single item in stock.

Every one of the systems in the cascade that terminated the author's employment in practice should have an override or undo button. For security reasons, it should probably set off alarm bells pretty high up, but a director was already involved, which should have been sufficient approval.

Edit:

In "The Count of MonteCristo" by Alexandre Dumas, the protagonist was accused of aiding Bonaparte, and in the French island prison meets the priest who was accused (under Bonaparte) of aiding royalty. (I may have switched that around, it's been a while since reading). So even though switches in power occur, once incarcerated the evolving machine does not correct its past decisions.

When you automate corporate decisions with code, there is no real judicial branch (arbitrator, judges, ...), only an executive branch (computers) and a legislative branch (programmers). Hence there is no appeal mechanism.

In theory one could formalize our natural language concepts so that a verifier (for example MetaMath verifier) can act as a neutral judge. Then the automated corporate decisions would not just compute the decision to be taken, but also the proof that this is follows from the axiomatic corporate rules. Of course there is no guarantee that such a set of axioms actually encode what the corporation truly wishes, so even in the system I describe Ibrahim would get fired, BUT with the difference that he (and any superiors all the way up to the director) can see the "proof" of why this "should" happen, at which point they will understand which rule(s) were misformalized, which rule(s) did not accurately convey their intention. At this point they could fix the rule(s) and verify all the previously generated decisions with proofs, and possibly identify other individuals who where a bit meeker, and after the 3rd signal something was wrong simply went home never showing up again...

They might be, or might not be. Constructive dismissal is a thing.

Every real merchant who deals with the public at scale accepts this and refunds in such cases. Presumably they eat the cost or THEY purchase insurance for the shipping and roll this into the cost so they don't have to tell customers I'm spending YOUR money on drugs and hookers and don't care if you actually got anything for it.

Such interactions absolutely destroy relationships with customers and the customers bank is likely to issue a charge back to protect their relationship with their customers.