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My handwriting is not your handwriting, nor is it millions of other Americans' handwritings!

There's also plenty of edge cases: letters get wet, they smudge, get torn or folded, and so forth. A postal system that processes 420 million letters a day[1] with a 99% true positive rate on OCR still needs to divert 4.2 million letters for manual review.

[1]: https://facts.usps.com/one-day/

And as a postal service, writing off 4.2mil letters is absolutely unacceptable so thus we must dedicate the resources to mitigate this tail risk.

This is a common pattern, and why I think AI risk is overstated…unless we suddenly decide to start wholesale writing off the consequences of tail risk.

It will be little solace for the 98% of employees that get laid of by AI to know that at least 2% if their co-workers remain employed.

In other words, AI doesn't have to do anything perfectly to replace a large percentage of the workforce.

That's why this is the last facility that does this job—all the other ones are now unnecessary because machines can process enough of the mail.

"Cannot reproduce the bug on my local development environment. Ticket closed"