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Comment by 8uhaal | Hacker News Reader

So here we are discussing how AI will soon kill us all or at least solve the big questions of science, and at the same time we employ 800 souls in Utah working 70 hours a week to decipher bad handwriting.

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I suggest you watch Tom Scot mentioned in another comment and it might change your opinion. When OCR system was initially started 50% were done automatically. Today that is greater than 99%. Less than 1% are now handled by the Utah center and they it still going down (After closing rest of the centers already and Utah center is last remaining one).

Exactly my point! Machine takeover is further than you'd think, because of the long tail.

I think people underestimate the long tail of most problems. Even if it’s 98% good, what do you do with that last 2%? The same applies for self-driving and other computer vision related technologies.

> what do you do with that last 2%?

My plan when I finally purchase a self-driving car is to get 800 people from Utah to help me navigate for that last 2%

Realistically, keep running Utah until the next round of sweeping budget cuts comes, then cook up some reason to return/destroy the remaining 2% as "undeliverable" and shut it down. Good service always gets sacrificed to save 2%

I remember a patio11 thread about exactly this — once your operations reach a certain scale, even a 0.1% of cases problem takes a whole department to deal with

Shows that some things just can't be provided by the private sector and need a govt agency like the USPS. A private corp would have shut this down long ago and just required in their terms&conditions that people write in an easily OCR-able style, else the letter gets dropped without notice. Letting the govt take care of this gives people more freedom - for example the freedom to get old and have a handwriting that a machine has issues with.

https://ozgurnevres.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/terminato...

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