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Comment by sottol | Hacker News Reader

But is that really what you want to happen IN GOVERNMENT? For bureaucracy to adapt even mildly flawed technology?! Bureaucracy + blind trust in hierarchy/computers = Kafka-esque hellscape.

"I'm sorry sir, but the computer clearly says that you've been charged with sexual harassment - we cannot renew your driver's license and we're putting you on the sexual offenders list, please report to your local PD weekly." (completely made up and exaggerated, but I'm sure one can think of similar scenarios) [1] Good luck convincing the clerk that that's not real. You can probably get it corrected after months of your time and $$.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/05/chatgpt...

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Things are bad enough already, even with pre-LLM technology. "I'm sorry sir, your 8-year old son can't board this plane because the system says he's a terrorist" [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/nyregion/14watchlist.html

You're using a straw example to try to claim a massive point.

There are 340 million people in the US. The US has one of the largest government systems that humanity is likely to ever see. How many similar cases of children being put on the terrorist watch list have there been in the past 20 years? Unless there are a lot of cases of that happening, if it's not rare (hint: it's extraordinarily rare; your example story is from 13 years ago), your premise is pure straw.

Wouldn't being innocently jailed for 9 days because of a wrong face recognition count as another example?

[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/face-recognition-software-led-to... [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/27/california-p...

Jesus Christ

An example against adoption of larger, more generalized, and less reliable models, yes

>"I'm sorry sir, but the computer clearly says that you've been charged with sexual harassment - we cannot renew your driver's license and we're putting you on the sexual offenders list, please report to your local PD weekly."

>(completely made up and exaggerated, but I'm sure one can think of similar scenarios)

How about "I'm sorry sir, but the computer clearly says that you've been at the site of murder and thus killed this guy. Even though all other direct evidence contradicts this, we're gonna have to arrest you. "[1]

The best part of working on projects that used that data set in Google was learning about it from articles like this one.

[1]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-arre...

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