This clip contains the actual “mistake”, ironically a bug: https://youtu.be/XGge4rj4v_Y
Edit: idiocracy is a great film. However watching these dystopian films as a software engineer is somewhat stressful :)
Edit: idiocracy is a great film. However watching these dystopian films as a software engineer is somewhat stressful :)
Mike Judge being an engineer went on to make lots of great satiric and really truthful comedic views of technology in Idiocracy, Office Space and Silicon Valley.
Gilliam and Judge have an excellent knack for nailing the biting areas of this and making fun of it fantastically with satire.
All you can do is laugh knowing how scary it can get, knowing how little say engineers actually have to be ethical and how unethical and incorrect some of these systems pushed can be.
We should take decisions by systems as we do foreign policy: "Trust, but verify". This is more difficult when verifying the decision process of an algorithm is unclear. At least giving someone a required speedy chance to deal with a data/system decision that affects their life.
I saw it again about a year later.
Which made me realise just how mind-warping the film was. Another three decades and some on, I realise, largely in a truthful way.