Comment by CodeWriter23
5 years ago
> I keep reading this on the internet as if it’s some sort of truism
I don’t believe this statement was initially intended to be axiomatic, rather, to serve as a reminder that the injury one is currently suffering is perhaps more likely than not, the result of human frailty.
I'm not sure it's even attributable to stupidity (necessarily) as attributable to automation or, more long-windedly, attributable to the fact that automation at scale will sometimes scale in wacky ways and said scale also makes it nearly impossible--or at least unprofitable--to insert meaningful human intervention into the loop.
Not Google, but a few months back I suddenly couldn't post on Twitter. Why? Who knows. I don't really do politics on Twitter and certainly don't post borderline content in general. I opened a support ticket and a follow-up one and it got cleared about a week later. Never found out a reason. I could probably have pulled strings if I had to but fortunately didn't need to. But, yeah, you can just randomly lose access to things because some algorithm woke up on the wrong side of the bed.
>said scale also makes it nearly impossible--or at least unprofitable--to insert meaningful human intervention into the loop.
Retail and hotels and restaurants can insert meaningful human intervention with less than 5% profit margins, but a company with consistent $400k+ profit per employee per quarter can not?
https://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyeit.php?code=GO...
This is what I'm talking about in my original comment about the malice and stupidity aphorism.
Someone or some team of people is making the conscious decision that the extra profit from not having human intervention is worth more than avoiding the harm caused to innocent parties.
This is not a retail establishment barely surviving due to intense competition that may have false positives every now and then because it's not feasible to catch 100% of the errors.
This is an organization that has consistently shown they value higher profits due to higher efficiencies from automation more than giving up even an ounce of that to prevent destroying some people's livelihoods. And they're not going to state that on their "About Us" page on their website. But we can reasonably deduce it from their consistent actions over 10+ years.
Fair enough. Scale does make things harder but my $FINANCIAL_INSTITUTION has a lot of scale too and, if I have an issue with my account, I'll have someone on the phone sooner rather than later.
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I was just paying a bill online.
I had loading images turned off in my browser.
So I get the checkbox captcha thing, and checking it is not enough, so I have to click on taxis, etc. Which didn't initially show because of images being off.
I eventually did turn on images for the site and reload it. But at first, I was like "wait a minute, why should I have to have images on to pay a bill?" and I clicked a bunch of things I'd never tried before to see if there was an alternative. It appears that you have to be able to do either the image captcha or some sort of auditory thing. I guess accessibility doesn't include Helen Keller, or to someone who has both images and speaker turned off (which I have done at some times).
Maybe this is hard for someone younger to understand, but when I was first using computers, many had neither high quality graphics nor audio - that was a special advanced thing called "multimedia". It feels like something is severely wrong with the world if that is now a requirement to interact and do basic stuff online.
Genuinely-handicapped users should certainly have accommodations that allow them to pay bills using the necessary accessibility tools. It's always tricky to keep those tools from being leveraged by spammers and phishers, though, as witnessed by how TDD services for the deaf were misused in the past. Hard problem to solve in general, either through legislation or technology.
But if you're an ordinary user without special challenges, why would you expect anything to work after turning images off in your browser? If you're that much of a Luddite, maybe computers and technology aren't appropriate areas of interest for you to pursue.
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I would agree. It's not useful in the context of remediation or defense, but on a human emotional level it's extremely helpful.
When Google kills your business it doesn't help your business to assume no malice, but it may help you not feel as personally insulted, which ultimately is worth a lot to the human experience.
Humans can be totally happy living in poverty if they feel loved and validated, or totally miserable living as Kings if they feel they are surrounded by backstabbers and plotters. Intent doesn't matter to outcome, but it sure does to the way we feel about it.