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The Machine Fired Me

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Re: The Machine Fired Me

#541

Post by haskellandchill »

yipbub wrote: post #409
c12 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 huma…

I think it won't be mitigated, given my experience working as a data scientist. It will be ignored because it is profitable to ignore it. If we slowed down and figured out how to make machines mimic human empathy before we make them make decisions it could be mitigated, but we won't do that. Ask your boss about it.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#542

Post by Proziam »

wpietri wrote: post #533
eezurr wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's important to start talking about, and acknowledging, that nearly every second of the average person's life is thinking about something that is within their own universe of their life's experiences. So plausibly, this really was an innocent and understandable mistake. Maybe they grew up in a town full of white people, and maybe all of their friends and coworkers are white. I understand what they did is te…

Again, something can be racism and something else. > Maybe they grew up in a town full of white people, and maybe all of their friends and coworkers are white. This is not an accident. All-white contexts in America are the result of personal and systemic racism. People who grow up in those contexts are, unsurprisingly, more likely to be personally biased and will regardless do things that further systemic racism. Peo…

I don't think it's likely that all the folks in Vermont are racist or that the system of governance there is supremely racist - yet Vermont has an absolutely tiny percentage of non-white folks (3.1%)

Less than 15% of the U.S. is African American so it's not at all surprising that there are areas where there are very few black folks as a result. That's nobody's fault and shouldn't be described as racist because, well, it isn't.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#543

Post by ubernostrum »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #305
ubernostrum wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody who is in your building, is doing work under your direction, and has not been told they are fired hasn't been fired. They might be, or might not be. Constructive dismissal is a thing.

No, being fired is when a person with authority tells you you're dismissed; it's an active and explicit form of dismissal. Constructive dismissal is dismissal, for all intents and purposes, without being fired.

Constructive dismissal is treated as "you quit, but you quit because the conditions imposed on you were such that you had no choice, and we will treat that as the company firing you rather than you voluntarily choosing to quit".

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#544

Post by philliphaydon »

icebraining wrote: post #453
philliphaydon wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They were sending your account to debt collectors over $1.27? I think that's an even bigger WTF than the original story.

Sorry, 2 years of NOT using PayPal.

I donno. This is PayPal Australia, maybe they operate differently. I couldn’t even figure out how my account got into a negative balance to begin with.

Unfortunately I don’t have any of the old emails otherwise I would upload it.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#545

Post by JJMcJ »

pc86 wrote: post #351
DanBC wrote: 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.

Let's just say that if a system didn't recognize white people's faces, it probably wouldn't be viewed as "done".

If it's not worth the trouble to see if your system works for non-whites, that's beyond lazy.

Like the soap dispensers that don't work for dark skinned people.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#547

Post by wpietri »

Proziam wrote: post #542
wpietri wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, something can be racism and something else. > Maybe they grew up in a town full of white people, and maybe all of their friends and coworkers are white. This is not an accident. All-white contexts in America are the result of personal and systemic racism. People who grow up in those contexts are, unsurprisingly, more likely to be personally biased and will regardless do things that further systemic racism. Peo…

I don't think it's likely that all the folks in Vermont are racist or that the system of governance there is supremely racist - yet Vermont has an absolutely tiny percentage of non-white folks (3.1%) Less than 15% of the U.S. is African American so it's not at all surprising that there are areas where there are very few black folks as a result. That's nobody's fault and shouldn't be described as racist because, well,…

This is historically ignorant. I don't blame you personally, because the American education system is very bad at covering America's racist history. But you're still basing your estimation of "likely" not on real data, but on what you'd like to be true.

If you'd like to learn more, start with Loewen's "Sundown Towns", which describes how hundreds and possibly thousands of towns across the US were turned and kept white:

https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...

These were known as "sundown towns" because non-white people had to leave by sundown or face violence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town

These came about not because there were never any black people, but because white people indulged in violent ethnic cleansing. This happened most prominently during the Nadir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...

He proves this quite clearly through census data, where places that used to be racially mixed suddenly got white and then stayed that way for decades.

He doesn't give any specific Vermont examples, but Vermont had a prominent Klan presence in the 1920s: http://vermonthistory.org/research/research-resources-online...

Later, as suburbanization happened, white supremacy was maintained more subtly, through means such as racial covenants: https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/discrimination-in-deed/C...

It's also not necessary for a lot of white people to be actively racist to preserve white supremacy. As is clear from Loewen's book, all it takes is a small number of people willing to be active (e.g., making threats, burning crosses) to drive off new black arrivals. The majority can be passively accepting of a racist system without lifting a finger.

But that doesn't mean they won't end up biased. White people who don't know many black people are more likely to be biased, and all-white towns produce people that are more likely to have racist views. (For more, see Loewen's Ch 11, "The effects of sundown towns on whites".)

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#548

Post by zaarn »

bena wrote: post #501
zaarn wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that people refer to a machine as authority but that the process has no abort button. When you design business processes like these, firing, hiring or managing people always keep in mind something can go wrong. Always include an abort button to either stop or roll back the process.

There's a problem with the "human override" option as well. Make it too easy to override and then the system just doesn't matter anymore. It's basically the issue we're trying to solve, where to draw that line?

The system is meant to automated a certain process, some business process among different people.

It does not loose meaning because it can be aborted if stuff goes FUBAR.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#549

Post by icebraining »

philliphaydon wrote: post #544
icebraining wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were sending your account to debt collectors over $1.27? I think that's an even bigger WTF than the original story.

Sorry, 2 years of NOT using PayPal. I donno. This is PayPal Australia, maybe they operate differently. I couldn’t even figure out how my account got into a negative balance to begin with. Unfortunately I don’t have any of the old emails otherwise I would upload it.

To be clear, I wasn't in any way doubting you, just marveling at their absurd practices :)

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#550

Post by vsl »

teekert wrote: post #243
ReverseCold wrote: post #241

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.

That's more about CYA. The pharmacist would risk a lot by giving out the medicine without proper prescription. They may know it's OK, but they won't risk an overzealous prosecution, for example.
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