Hacker News Reader

Comment by blooalien | Hacker News Reader

> "but she wasn't willing to disagree with the computer"

This mentality is far too common among modern humans. I've suffered these people at banks, bill pay stations, travel situations, etc. It's especially annoying when you're facing them with undeniable evidence that the machine contains mistaken data and they still respond with "I'm sorry, sir. There's nothing I can do. It says right here that you owe {$random-money}." Machines can be wrong, and even more commonly, the people who enter data into those machines can be wrong. But then you get these people who can clearly see that something is wrong, but they refuse to refute what the machine tells them? Why?

I swear, when the machines finally decide humans are obsolete, we'll happily line up and willingly march into the kill-box…

View on HN

Unfortunately it's turtles all the way down (up?) - should they ignore the computer and make a mistake, they no doubt will face their employer confronting them with 'the computer told you so and you flagrantly ignored it'.

The recently uncovered UK post office accounting scandal goes to show that the computer is assumed correct by default!

It is because no one has to take responsibility for the machine. If you then overwrite the machine, then you have the responsibility of the decision.

It starts young; in grade school. I saw it with my son and his peers with simple graphing calculators and their math homework. They'd punch in some numbers, get a result, and that was that. Try as I might, I couldn't convince them that garbage in leads to garbage out. In their minds, the machine was infallible.

To be fair though businesses havd always used these 'buffer' tactics. Where now it's software, the all-knowing never-wrong magical boxes that cannot be reasoned with, before it was District Managers who were never available, secretaries as literal gatekeepers, 'company policy' which is nothing but some garbage some department decided on, but they make sound like a law. On and on, round and round. :(

This is my biggest problem with working in the video security / FR industry: the industry completely ignores end-user training and the obvious necessity for the operators of this class of software to be screened for A) computer literacy to the degree they understand this is just software and NOT an authority, and B) operators of video security software need to be screened for Racial Blindness - if a person cannot tell the difference between near age siblings or cousins of an ethnicity other than their own, and specifically the ethnicity they police, they need to be legally regulated as ineligible to operate such software.

The problem is a lot of people who work these roles are so demoralised, they see themselves as a kind of almost-robot when it comes to fulfilling their job duties. They don't feel they have the autonomy to apply common sense.

It's a weird mixed feeling of annoyance and pity when you run into one of these folks.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -Upton Sinclair

Reply on news.ycombinator.com