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The Machine Fired Me

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Re: The Machine Fired Me

#401

Post by falcolas »

perl4ever wrote: post #127
milesvp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even simpler explanation is that false positives are real. All sufficiently complex systems have them. I'd imagine that triggering a false positive the first time greatly increases the likelihood that a second false positive is triggered. I'd also further assert, that simply being an HN reader means you are more likely to trigger a false positive than the rest of the population. Blizzard does some very aggressive mem…

As someone who hasn't played computer games much since the 90s, I read comments like this and am just boggled by how seriously everyone takes games these days, the players, and the vendors, and the general public. It's as if you had to get a security clearance to use a wiffle ball and bat.

It only takes 1 person to ruin the experience for hundreds, or thousands, of others in online games. Given each of those people is a source of recurring revenue to Blizzard-Activision, the actions taken against cheaters is understandable.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#402

Post by jexah »

teekert wrote: post #363
acomjean wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right and make an interesting point. Part of the advantage of dealing with a human is that one hopes they can deal with whatever strange problem it thrown at them. If you can’t deal with corner cases, or have none than leveraging rules/software is the way to go. I think of vending machines and parking meters as automation of simple tasks, but what to do when they break? I think google tries this by trying to…

When they (the machines) break, a human should be able to override, i.e., I was once stuck in a malfunctioning parking garage (no ability to pay, barrier stayed shut), so I lifted the barrier and let everyone out without paying. This could be illegal, but keeping me in a parking garage without telling me how long it will take is also a crime. Please don't make human un-openable parking garages, ever (meaning: don't l…

This is a completely different scenario to the one described above. You yourself are potentially breaking the law (if the boom gate is damaged, assisting in potential theft of services rendered, etc) to prevent your car being stuck in the parking lot (which very likely has a clause in the conditions of entry, so may not be illegal).

The two key points are that you are committing the crime yourself, not asking somebody else to, and that it is in fact only potentially a crime, and even then it's relatively minor, and could be argued strongly in court.

You are not asking somebody else to illegally sell you opioids (for example) with no prescription. From what it sounds like, nobody was in real danger, just pain, and you expect people to risk everything they've spent their entire life working for just to prevent an hour of pain for some stranger?

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#403

Post by philliphaydon »

icebraining wrote: post #386
philliphaydon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to delink my bank account from PayPal, so I could close it, and it refused cos I apparently owed $1.27 even tho my balance said $0. I tried to add a credit card but it was flagged as suspicious. Contacting PayPal they said I needed to go into the bank and put some money, my account so PayPal could take it. But I had already closed the bank account. After PayPal refusing to help. I resolved it by opening a new…

Curious, why did you care? I think I'd just leave the account open.

I never knew I had a negative balance. Until after 2 years of it using PayPal they sent me a random email to inform me I had 30 days before they would pass it to debt collectors. So I figured better to close the account. Never use PayPal anyway.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#404

Post by jexah »

mozumder wrote: post #399
rando444 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because nothing in it is realistic, does not make it a comedy.

Just because two sentences are next to each other, does not make it conditional on the first.

You're right, it's not always the case, but in that format the second sentence is usually a justification of the first. Also, Black Mirror is not a comedy.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#405

Post by vinceguidry »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #164

This is the problem of imperative/functional programming languages, instead of using provers/verifiers. 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, o…

I believe it became custom in many parts of Europe around that time to clean out the prisons whenever a new monarch took office, obviously that wouldn't have always happened, but at least they saw it as a problem and took steps to rectify it. It did, after all, cost some amount of money to house them, and obviously the new king would have wanted room to house prisoners of his own.

It wasn't until modern times that prison became a place for common criminals, in those days only political offenders would be put away. Common criminals were variously fined, branded, and in serious cases, transported. Prison was considered a gift, the usual, Roman-era way of dealing with your political enemies once you achieved office was to execute them. Exile was considered, but someone of means would find a way to get back.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#406

Post by vinceguidry »

kbart wrote: post #311
pkaye wrote: post #176

When a previous company was acquired, everyone got a new job offer generally better since the company wanted everyone to stick around. Well except for one guy. A junior engineer in one of our teams. He was a really good engineer too so we were shocked. It turned out he had the same first and last name as another person at our company so they thought it was a duplicate entry and omitted it. Eventually a offer was prep…

Heh, that's the real problem actually with buggy name-based systems. In my current company we have a person officially called "Name Surname 2" for the same reason.

Because Name Surname 1 was already taken!

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#408

Post by JakeAl »

skywhopper wrote: post #389
pc86 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not racism, that's laziness. Or perhaps just being a bad engineer, if you want to be more cynical about it. It's not that hard to find both conscious and subconscious examples of systemic or individual racism. Engineers taking the easy path with webcam facial recognition is probably not a good one and serves only to give more fuel to those who claim people jump to the racism cry too quickly.

But laziness around something that dispropotionately impacts people based on their race is racist. If you know your system has a harder time training against non-white faces, and you choose to train it only against white faces to be lazy, that's still explicitly racist. This isn't even a case of negligent racism ("oh well I didn't know my system wouldn't work for people with darker skin because only my white coworker…

Skin color is not synonymous with race. Every race has people that span a wide range of skin tones, and skin tone fades with age, so you may as well be arguing it's ageism.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#409

Post by yipbub »

c12 wrote: post #327
lmm wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't. Blindly following orders from humans has much the same results.

When the orders come from a human then there is someone who is ultimatly responsible, someone to put through the courts, someone to throw in jail. When the orders come from a computer. Will any of that happen, will there be someone responsible?

yeah, but punitive justice is the least consequential thing in those situations. The major reason you'd punish someone there is to stop someone from willfully repeating the scenario. There exists a path for learning and prevention in automated systems too.

The danger I see is the stifling of potential human subjective decisions. That broad decisions will be made and carried out without a sanity/humanity check by humans.

I think measures should be put in place for a guarantee of human intervention in the case of situational anomaly or system error as well as an emphasis on redress.

Since automation scales and a human workforce doesn't, a guarantee of human intervention might not be practically possible.

Anyone have any ideas on how this kind of thing might be mitigated?

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