7 ms·

Increasing we automate processes, have programs do the work humans once did. It's extremely helpful and productive, but it has a darker side. The processes are

by srer 4y ago

Increasing we automate processes, have programs do the work humans once did. It's extremely helpful and productive, but it has a darker side. The processes are rigid because machines are rigid, and the designers cater to the 99% cases. But then the 1% happens, and you're left out in the cold. In the old world of humans and paper, as wasteful as it was, it was easy for exceptions to be made if the clerk was willing, and if they weren't you'd find another clerk, or a clerks supervisor. The processes tended towards being flexible. But today, you increasingly don't interact with any humans, or if you do don't be surprised if, in your unusual case, they say "the computer won't let me". As governments move more and more towards digitization, and embrace machine learning, I expect similar stories might unfold - only it won't be with an opt in social media website.

treeman79 4y ago
My wife and most of her friends have all lost their Facebook accounts at least once. They all gave up getting them back. Many tears as most of them use it as their only photo backup for kid pictures. At this point it’s just routine for them to have their account taken over and lost periodically.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  > Many tears as most of them use it as their only photo backup for kid pictures. Painful as that is, those of us who tend more technical should be helping people understand the nature of social media companies, and encouraging backups in whatever form is supported. ... and then helping push them over the edge to find other ways to communicate with friends, share photos, etc. "Do it all on Facebook!" was novel, 10-12 years ago. Now it's just a lack of creativity and a willingness to help add feet to the next yacht.
- mnahkies 4y ago
  My girlfriend's mother had this happen to her recently. They got in and changed her password, profile picture and name. Account recovery options didn't work, and also reporting the profile as stolen / whatever option was most appropriate on the form didn't achieve anything. I found it quite confusing as to the motivation, and seeming gap in the armour of automated bans. As far as I know, many people get instant banned if they attempt to setup a second profile for their Oculus or similar, I assume the motivation is to get a fake account that has history to avoid this. What surprises me though is that changing password, profile picture and full name in quick succession + attempts to recover / report don't trigger this mechanism/some kind of review process.
- baby 4y ago
  I feel like losing all your stuff is part of your digital journey. Then you learn the importance of backups. Nowadays cloud backups are almost becoming default which is a good thing imo.
  - black_puppydog 4y ago
    Facebook was their cloud backup
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      Backup is a backup only if you have working copy. If not it is the working copy even not in use.
    - baby 4y ago
      Facebook is not a backup tool, that was their mistake.
artificialLimbs 4y ago
Reminds me of the rollout of Obamacare. I went to sign up on the website almost immediately. Ran into a host of errors. Called numerous times and every agent there told me they couldn't help and didn't know what was wrong. The solution: call us back in 3-4 weeks.
at-fates-hands 4y ago
>> In the old world of humans and paper, as wasteful as it was, it was easy for exceptions to be made if the clerk was willing, One of my first jobs out of college was an account manager at a big corporation. It was an easy job. Half customer service and half sales. The guy in the cube next to me was always chided for being a dinosaur because his desk (in his words) "looked like a tree just puked on his desk" because of all the paper copies he had floating around - but damn if he couldn't find a contract six months old or an email with some promise he had made a client a year earlier. It was his file system and it worked magically. You'd ask him a question and he'd look around and then dive to a stack of copies of contracts, come up with the right contract and let the customer know the details so quickly. Customer's loved him because he could reference things so quickly and was so sharp with conversations and notes he had taken. No problem if his laptop crashed - he already had a paper copy. He always referenced himself as a go-between the paper world and the digital world that was quickly consuming his talents. I heard he retired a few years back - but he was the guy you're talking about to a tee. He was around during the transition to email from everything being paper. Dude still made it work, even when he knew his time had come and gone.
EnKopVand 4y ago
> As governments move more and more towards digitization, and embrace machine learning I spent a decade in the public sector digitalisation of Denmark, a country that competes with Estonia about having the most digitalisation in the world. I fully believe we should legislate against automated processes taking decisive actions. It’s inefficient, but what I experienced in regards to laws is that they are way more messy than anyone working in digitalisation seem to realise. We build a system that let employees report their business-related driving, in Denmark you get a tax-reduction when you drive in your own car for work purposes, and the laws covering it is basically an A4 page of tax-law that seems sort of clear. You have 3 set of taxation rates that you get to deduct from, they are meant to be used for different types of work related driving. Simple, right? Well, it turned out that in 9 different municipalities there was 9 different ways to interpret that A4 page of law text, and, more than a 100 different union agreements on how to extend or alter the tax law for certain groups of workers. As hilarious as it was to sit through meetings with different sets of tax people from different municipalities getting into heated arguments about who was break the law, it was also sort of eye opening for me at the time. Because we made this as an OSS project where we bought the development that we project managed. My role was part of the project management team as a code-reviewer/specifier of sorts, and all our estimates simply went out the window when we realised we really had to build all those different ways of interpreting the law, as well as making room for future alterations. In the end, it didn’t extend the project that much, I think we still delivered it on schedule but it was a very different product with lots and lots of setup required, because the different municipalities needed to be capable of deciding which rules were turned on for which groups of workers, as well as control over how the approval system was handled by everything from tax lawyers going through every submission to secretaries to RPA robots simply clicking accept on everything. The system wasn’t related to decision making automation that couldn’t be easily undone by humans, because it was still a relatively simple system. But if that sort of complexity is what you get from some of the simplest legislation we have, then imagine what it would look like for laws covering thousands of A4 pages of text.
- fauigerzigerk 4y ago
  >I fully believe we should legislate against automated processes taking decisive actions. There are certainly decisions that should not be fully automated. But this has very little to do with the account recovery issue we're talking about. I believe that account recovery, and more generally proving your identity, can be done automatically with greater accuracy and far more securely than any process involving humans. We have secure, electronic, government issued identity documents that are perfectly suitable for automation. Let's just use them! If we must legislate then let's introduce a right to prove our identity using our government issued ID. There are other issues related to oligopoly accounts that are hard to solve. But proof of identity is not one of them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
femto 4y ago
> As governments move more and more towards digitization, and embrace machine learning, I expect similar stories might unfold - only it won't be with an opt in social media website. It's already arrived, in the form of the Australian government's "Robodebt" scheme: 20,000 automated debt notices per week with minimal oversight [1]. The government denies it killed people, but there are claims that it did [2]. After several years a court eventually stopped the scheme and awarded about $2 billion in compensation, but by then a lot of lives had been ruined. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme [2] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/31/not-correct-that-robodebt-caused-suicides-former-head-of-human-services-says https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/31/not-c...
Schroedingersat 4y ago
It has nothing to do with automation and everything to do with unaccountable centralisation of power. It does not matter what moderation scheme they use -- automated or beauraucratic, if you gift the town square to a private entity and allow access to it to be determined hy their whims you get this.

by srer 4y ago

treeman79 4y ago

My wife and most of her friends have all lost their Facebook accounts at least once. They all gave up getting them back. Many tears as most of them use it as their only photo backup for kid pictures. At this point it’s just routine for them to have their account taken over and lost periodically.

Syonyk 4y ago
> Many tears as most of them use it as their only photo backup for kid pictures. Painful as that is, those of us who tend more technical should be helping people understand the nature of social media companies, and encouraging backups in whatever form is supported. ... and then helping push them over the edge to find other ways to communicate with friends, share photos, etc. "Do it all on Facebook!" was novel, 10-12 years ago. Now it's just a lack of creativity and a willingness to help add feet to the next yacht.
mnahkies 4y ago
My girlfriend's mother had this happen to her recently. They got in and changed her password, profile picture and name. Account recovery options didn't work, and also reporting the profile as stolen / whatever option was most appropriate on the form didn't achieve anything. I found it quite confusing as to the motivation, and seeming gap in the armour of automated bans. As far as I know, many people get instant banned if they attempt to setup a second profile for their Oculus or similar, I assume the motivation is to get a fake account that has history to avoid this. What surprises me though is that changing password, profile picture and full name in quick succession + attempts to recover / report don't trigger this mechanism/some kind of review process.
baby 4y ago
I feel like losing all your stuff is part of your digital journey. Then you learn the importance of backups. Nowadays cloud backups are almost becoming default which is a good thing imo.
- black_puppydog 4y ago
  Facebook was their cloud backup
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Backup is a backup only if you have working copy. If not it is the working copy even not in use.
  - baby 4y ago
    Facebook is not a backup tool, that was their mistake.

artificialLimbs 4y ago

Reminds me of the rollout of Obamacare. I went to sign up on the website almost immediately. Ran into a host of errors. Called numerous times and every agent there told me they couldn't help and didn't know what was wrong. The solution: call us back in 3-4 weeks.

at-fates-hands 4y ago

>> In the old world of humans and paper, as wasteful as it was, it was easy for exceptions to be made if the clerk was willing, One of my first jobs out of college was an account manager at a big corporation. It was an easy job. Half customer service and half sales. The guy in the cube next to me was always chided for being a dinosaur because his desk (in his words) "looked like a tree just puked on his desk" because of all the paper copies he had floating around - but damn if he couldn't find a contract six months old or an email with some promise he had made a client a year earlier. It was his file system and it worked magically. You'd ask him a question and he'd look around and then dive to a stack of copies of contracts, come up with the right contract and let the customer know the details so quickly. Customer's loved him because he could reference things so quickly and was so sharp with conversations and notes he had taken. No problem if his laptop crashed - he already had a paper copy. He always referenced himself as a go-between the paper world and the digital world that was quickly consuming his talents. I heard he retired a few years back - but he was the guy you're talking about to a tee. He was around during the transition to email from everything being paper. Dude still made it work, even when he knew his time had come and gone.

EnKopVand 4y ago

> As governments move more and more towards digitization, and embrace machine learning I spent a decade in the public sector digitalisation of Denmark, a country that competes with Estonia about having the most digitalisation in the world. I fully believe we should legislate against automated processes taking decisive actions. It’s inefficient, but what I experienced in regards to laws is that they are way more messy than anyone working in digitalisation seem to realise. We build a system that let employees report their business-related driving, in Denmark you get a tax-reduction when you drive in your own car for work purposes, and the laws covering it is basically an A4 page of tax-law that seems sort of clear. You have 3 set of taxation rates that you get to deduct from, they are meant to be used for different types of work related driving. Simple, right? Well, it turned out that in 9 different municipalities there was 9 different ways to interpret that A4 page of law text, and, more than a 100 different union agreements on how to extend or alter the tax law for certain groups of workers. As hilarious as it was to sit through meetings with different sets of tax people from different municipalities getting into heated arguments about who was break the law, it was also sort of eye opening for me at the time. Because we made this as an OSS project where we bought the development that we project managed. My role was part of the project management team as a code-reviewer/specifier of sorts, and all our estimates simply went out the window when we realised we really had to build all those different ways of interpreting the law, as well as making room for future alterations. In the end, it didn’t extend the project that much, I think we still delivered it on schedule but it was a very different product with lots and lots of setup required, because the different municipalities needed to be capable of deciding which rules were turned on for which groups of workers, as well as control over how the approval system was handled by everything from tax lawyers going through every submission to secretaries to RPA robots simply clicking accept on everything. The system wasn’t related to decision making automation that couldn’t be easily undone by humans, because it was still a relatively simple system. But if that sort of complexity is what you get from some of the simplest legislation we have, then imagine what it would look like for laws covering thousands of A4 pages of text.

fauigerzigerk 4y ago
>I fully believe we should legislate against automated processes taking decisive actions. There are certainly decisions that should not be fully automated. But this has very little to do with the account recovery issue we're talking about. I believe that account recovery, and more generally proving your identity, can be done automatically with greater accuracy and far more securely than any process involving humans. We have secure, electronic, government issued identity documents that are perfectly suitable for automation. Let's just use them! If we must legislate then let's introduce a right to prove our identity using our government issued ID. There are other issues related to oligopoly accounts that are hard to solve. But proof of identity is not one of them.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

femto 4y ago

> As governments move more and more towards digitization, and embrace machine learning, I expect similar stories might unfold - only it won't be with an opt in social media website. It's already arrived, in the form of the Australian government's "Robodebt" scheme: 20,000 automated debt notices per week with minimal oversight [1]. The government denies it killed people, but there are claims that it did [2]. After several years a court eventually stopped the scheme and awarded about $2 billion in compensation, but by then a lot of lives had been ruined. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme [2] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/31/not-correct-that-robodebt-caused-suicides-former-head-of-human-services-says https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/31/not-c...

Schroedingersat 4y ago

It has nothing to do with automation and everything to do with unaccountable centralisation of power. It does not matter what moderation scheme they use -- automated or beauraucratic, if you gift the town square to a private entity and allow access to it to be determined hy their whims you get this.