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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

I’m wondering how it would work otherwise. Would computer systems need to be certified to be acceptable for ordinary record-keeping?

Extending this rule to LLM’s would clearly be disastrous. At a minimum, a record-keeping system needs to be written the old-fashioned way.

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If you scroll down to page 3, there is a concrete proposal. The citations for this are worth reading as they expand on the idea, e.g. https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr/article/view/5240/5083

The proposal is directly informed by the Post Office scandal in that it basically requires the prosecution to produce the same already-existing documents that revealed that Horizon had significant known faults.

The alternative is treating systems based evidence the same as witnesses. They're examined and cross referenced because they are rightly not presumed to be reliable.

I like this idea but since software and the data that runs through it changes constantly how would a system be interrogated if an incident were several years ago and the complete data picture cannot be reproduced?

Then the maintainers of the system have failed in their duty, the evidence cannot be verified, and it must be thrown out.

Well, in many safety-critical industries (e.g. manufacturing of medicinal products) you actually need to maintain objective evidence of its validation.

I'm guessing the other possibility is requiring a third party entity, like a university professor in CS, to testify unlikeliness of computer malfunction due to cosmic rays && bugs, for each and every computer generated evidences.

If the `alleged theft amount by defendant` == (unsigned int)((int)-1), that should cover those cases, at least in theory. The profs would just blindly vouch it, but at least it'll be a point.

Nope nope nope and nope. The author of the software and their source code shall be interrogated on the witness stand by one of their peers and a proof checker.

edit: gender neutral language

That'd be ideal! Require expert testimonials and judges with Master's in CS and EE or better for any court sessions involving computers. Up to UK people though.

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