Comment by dreamcompiler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dreamcompiler | Hacker News Reader

Remember when hotels charged outrageous fees to make a phone call from your room? That scam no longer works because everybody has a cell phone. Then they tried charging high fees for watching movies on the room's TV, and high fees for wifi. Those no longer work because everybody expects hotel wifi to be free and unlimited LTE is a thing now and nobody uses the TV in a hotel room any more.

Obviously this is just the latest such scam. Accuse people of smoking, refuse to show them the evidence, and charge them $500 to be split between the hotel and the sensor company.

Reminds me of the UK post office scandal where hundreds of innocent people went to prison because of software errors when the powers that be insisted the software was perfect and no auditing was possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

Yet again we have normies believing marketing bullshit that says "our proprietary algorithms are foolproof." We need laws that say any algorithm that can accuse a person of wrongdoing must be auditable and if it harms innocent people, the CEO of the company is both civilly and criminally liable.

“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”

I've never understood this old saw. The computer is just a tool. Somebody owns the computer, somebody installed it, somebody loaded software onto it. That's who should be held accountable.

Taken at face value, you couldn't even use a pocket calculator to back up a management decision.

"Taken at face value, you couldn't even use a pocket calculator to back up a management decision."

That makes no sense. I am the manager. I make the decision. The calculator gives me some numbers but I am still the manager, still the decision maker, and I can use any tools appropriate to inform my decisions. Even a calculator. Taken at face value, that's what it says. That the calculator doesn't make the management decision; a person does.

That's exactly what I'm saying. So what earthly point is there in saying, "A computer can't make management decisions, because it can't take responsibility?"

It's a content-free sentence. There is nothing special about a computer in that regard. It's a tool... a tool wielded by a human somewhere. Anyone who tries to blame "the computer" should not be allowed to do so, and it's weird that it ever occurred to anyone to try that.

In UK law, computers are assumed to be correct. It's on the defense to prove that the computer was wrong.

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