Comment by lotsofpulp
5 years ago
>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.
You're saying that as if it contradicts (“but”) what lotsofpulp said, but that was exactly their point: If your bank can do it, then so could Google. That they choose not to is a conscious choice, and not a beneficious one.
Conrad's corollary to Hanlon's razor: Said razor having been over-spread and under-understood on the Internet for a long while now, it's time to stop routinely attributing lots of things only to stupidity, when allowing that stupidity to continue unchecked and unabated actually is a form of malice.
(Hm, yeah, might need a bit of polishing, but I hope the gist is clear.)
I'd go with: "Sufficient stupidity[1] is indistinguishable from malice"
[1]: Where stupidity is further defined as "willful ignorance"
Meta: I’ve vouched for this comment. You have been shadowbanned.
I thought I was agreeing. "Fair enough."