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The Machine Fired Me

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481–490 of 578 posts

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#481
post #351
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The racism comes from saying "We recognise human faces" and then not recognising a significant proportion of humans.

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.

Actually, even if it is accidental or subconscious, I'd say this is a perfect example of systemic racism--racist behavior (I'm referring to an algorithm/device specifically here, which you can safely call objectively racist) which is normally within society's acceptance level which, when magnified to a societal scale, is no longer acceptable. Another symptom of this illness is that you might not even notice as a member of this system the system is broken if you're white, but you would if you're black.

Personally, I think it could be understandable people didn't consider race when developing facial recognition technology, especially when we've only had mainstream awareness of this for under a decade and many people live in racially homogeneous or dominated cultures. However, I don't think it's acceptable for organizations, and the time when you can safely say you didn't understand biased learning data will be over soon. There are considerations you need to make scaling your tech from personal project to something the public will consume.

Also, the day will come when computers can point out racist stuff better than the average human can now, albeit with a high false positive rate. I say this because it's relatively easy; even if you only count a subset of tweets talking about racism as not trolling, that's still a shockingly high number of meaningful things about the world many people aren't seeing.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#482
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every time I watch it I'm laughing my ass off. It's definitely not serious, or even satirical.

Most sci-fi has the problem of trying to model a situation with limited social scope. The fact that they never turn out true is because society has social safeguards to prevent it from happening that the writers don't model.

1984 is also a comedy.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fishy" is a very ungenerous read on the worker opting out of an arduous appeals process and cutting their losses. And if there's anything in the comments about "the manager and director being supportive", I don't see it -- where did you get that?

The bit about the manager and director is in the main article. There's nothing about pay, but they're presented as entirely sympathetic and angry about the system on his behalf. As for "fishy", I find it very strange that someone writes an article emphasising twice that they're out three weeks of pay, but then couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. There's breach of contract, this isn't a long and arduous appe…

I'll also note that small, claims court might be able to handle a case over just a few weeks pay. He wouldn't need a lawyer for that. The risk and costs of losing are more manageable. He could send some emails about the pay he lost asking nicely citing the work he did while there. Then firmly. Then, once at a better employer, he can take the case to small, claims court.

I'd actually rather people sue over this to establish some kind of case law where companies' legal teams tell their management to make a default policy of giving the missed pay on demand. There might already be case law on it.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#484
post #351
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The racism comes from saying "We recognise human faces" and then not recognising a significant proportion of humans.

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.

No, that is racism. It's not burning a cross on someone's lawn racism, but flat out ignoring a large swath of humanity is racism.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#485
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.

I agree. It's a well known problem where the training set isn't representative of the underlying population. While it can certainly be argued that the engineers should have recognized this deficiency and taken corrective action, I really don't understand why all the respondents to your post are so quick to assert racist intent based on clickbait headlines from Forbes.

Because it is racism. It is ignoring a large swath of humanity based on the color of their skin. You may not want to think of it as racism because it's not the burn a cross on their lawn type of racism, but it's still systemic racism.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#486

Engineers need to read The Trial by Franz Kafka. I don't think people fear soulless beurocracy without any possible resolution enough.

Also read the Unabomber Manifesto (Industrial Society and its Future). Technology enslaves us. But it can also liberate us, and we should seek to maximize the liberating force of technology and try to disrupt the enslaving tendency.

Also read his two books: "Technological Slavery" and "Anti-Tech Revolution"

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#487
post #51

Engineers need to read The Trial by Franz Kafka. I don't think people fear soulless beurocracy without any possible resolution enough.

One of my favorite parts: -- Before the Law A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to the law through an open doorway, but the doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says that it is possible "but not now". The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper…

?

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#488
post #161

This is literally an episode of Better Off Ted.[1] In it, the titular Ted is inadvertenly deleted from the company system when trying to correct a misspelling of his last name. Eventually, he is forced to interview for his own job as the system had already put out an ad for his replacement. I think the most striking part of it, and of the true story from the post, is the human factor - the idea that the humans involv…

So true. Recently I was at the pharmacy, the doctor wrote a wrong prescription and my wife was in the car having a hefty migraine. They wouldn't give me the drug even though they could see she has been using it for years and the wrong prescription could be solved afterwards. I think such people will be the first to be completely replaced by robots, I for sure wouldn't notice the difference, in fact I expect a robot t…

I wouldn't do that either. Because if I did that in the wrong instance, I would be fired. I'm sorry for your wife's migraines, but it's not worth me losing my ability to support my family.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#489
post #181
post #44

I have a story in a similar vein, although a much less scary one. In that instance, The Machine Cleaned Out My Desk. I had a cubicle at the company HQ, but was for some period of time working from home in another state. I still kept quite a few things in the cubicle (notebooks, mugs, etc), which I used when I was in the area. When I finally came back, I noticed, after a month or two, that my office number has not bee…

The next day I came back to see a pristine desk. With all my stuff gone. Something like this happened to me too at a previous employer, some things I recovered but many were just gone, the cleaning staff apparently help themselves to stuff that “former” employees leave behind, so my fancy headphones for example were just gone. Fucks given by HR/facilities? Zero. One of many similar incidents for me and my cow-orkers.…

"Ah you admit I was unfairly fired!" how about we settle for 9 months salary or my lawyers will be in touch.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay this example makes sense. No prescription == no drugs (especially for painkillers and other things that people abuse). If you think this is a bad thing, then it's an organizational problem and has nothing to do with computers.

If you are a human and you can see in the computer that the prescription is regularly updated and you can even call the doctor if you doubted it. You can even check the prescription afterwards and if my story doesn't check out, do something about it. The migraine was pretty bad, imo it was like not treating a broken leg because of a missing insurance card or something.

Except you are asking that pharmacist to break the law. If they got fired afterward, would you be the one to take them and their family in?
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