Comment by DoctorOetker
8 years ago
This is the problem of imperative/functional programming languages, instead of using provers/verifiers.
Edit:
In "The Count of MonteCristo" by Alexandre Dumas, the protagonist was accused of aiding Bonaparte, and in the French island prison meets the priest who was accused (under Bonaparte) of aiding royalty. (I may have switched that around, it's been a while since reading). So even though switches in power occur, once incarcerated the evolving machine does not correct its past decisions.
When you automate corporate decisions with code, there is no real judicial branch (arbitrator, judges, ...), only an executive branch (computers) and a legislative branch (programmers). Hence there is no appeal mechanism.
In theory one could formalize our natural language concepts so that a verifier (for example MetaMath verifier) can act as a neutral judge. Then the automated corporate decisions would not just compute the decision to be taken, but also the proof that this is follows from the axiomatic corporate rules. Of course there is no guarantee that such a set of axioms actually encode what the corporation truly wishes, so even in the system I describe Ibrahim would get fired, BUT with the difference that he (and any superiors all the way up to the director) can see the "proof" of why this "should" happen, at which point they will understand which rule(s) were misformalized, which rule(s) did not accurately convey their intention. At this point they could fix the rule(s) and verify all the previously generated decisions with proofs, and possibly identify other individuals who where a bit meeker, and after the 3rd signal something was wrong simply went home never showing up again...
I believe it became custom in many parts of Europe around that time to clean out the prisons whenever a new monarch took office, obviously that wouldn't have always happened, but at least they saw it as a problem and took steps to rectify it. It did, after all, cost some amount of money to house them, and obviously the new king would have wanted room to house prisoners of his own.
It wasn't until modern times that prison became a place for common criminals, in those days only political offenders would be put away. Common criminals were variously fined, branded, and in serious cases, transported. Prison was considered a gift, the usual, Roman-era way of dealing with your political enemies once you achieved office was to execute them. Exile was considered, but someone of means would find a way to get back.
There is a difference between a new monarch 1) letting a symbolic but insignificant fraction free to gain popularity / manufacture consent for the governance of the new monarch 2) clearing out all the prisoners.
Symbolically different alliances/parties fight each other, but within one such party/team the partners are competition too! Why liberate an old partner, if that increases your commpetition? Often the strategic value of this partner was low as the prisoner has been out of the loop, destabilized, broken. Automagically everyone agrees that "agitators are agitators" and a large fraction of the populace already believes whatever the political prisoner was accused of by the previous government.
Regarding petty criminals and the "expense" of housing prisoners, that story really gets old very fast to be honest. Although seldom depicted in caricatural movies, we know historically there were no dedicated mental institutions. In the past they locked them up with normal criminals, no distinction. And they did forced labour like textile industry, like proto-factories. From the perspective of government thats an income, not an expense!!
> It wasn't until modern times that prison became a place for common criminals, in those days only political offenders would be put away
I don't think it was universally true, for example, when the Bastille prison in Paris was taken at the start of the French Revolution, it held only common criminals, with the political prisoners having been moved before the start of the unrest.
Yeah, the French did a lot of things differently, the French national consciousness was matched only by its material wealth, so they could afford such frivolities.
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