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The authors seem to be torching a semantic straw man here. The same abuse of terms affords their spicy title. I'm not a UK lawyer, but the law they quote says

The authors seem to be torching a semantic straw man here. The same abuse of terms affords their spicy title. I'm not a UK lawyer, but the law they quote says nothing about the logic machines are programmed to follow presumptively creating reliable evidence. It could be read to say that computers should be presumed to be executing the instructions they're given reliably, unless evidence shows otherwise. It's about malfunction, not misapplication. Perhaps some of the Horizon case decisions showed judges improperly presuming that Horizon calculated correctly, and not just that the computers were running Horizon correctly. But the article doesn't show they did, or even explicitly say they did. Conflating two separable issues, it fails to address whether or why different presumption rules for each might be desirable.

chrisjj 2y ago
They are unfortunately conflated in law. " The Law Commission failed to address the strongest arguments against repeal without replacement, …. It ignored the advice of the experts they cited who all argued that the focus of courts should be on the reliability of computer evidence, …. The Law Commission’s comments and conclusions revealed that they had not understood the nature of computers and complex software systems as described in the sources upon which they relied.’ " https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/The-cause-of-the-Post-Office-Horizon-scandal-The-Law-Commission-Judges-Lawyers https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/The-cause-of-the-Post...
- deleted 2y ago
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- Terr_ 2y ago
  I would like to get those commission members to sit down and use a computer program which asks them their name, does a fancy "analyzing" animation, and concludes that that they owe $1 million in fees and are 99% likely to be the perpetrator of an unsolved murder. I mean, hey, the computer is operating correctly, it can't make a mistake, so give me my money and turn yourself in...
graemep 2y ago
"It could be read to say that computers should be presumed to be executing the instructions they're given reliably, unless evidence shows otherwise. It's about malfunction, not misapplication." You are making a technical distinction the law does not make. The law relates to the output - to the evidence generated from the system as a whole. The presumption is that the logic is correct too - which is why it is such a terrible assumption.
- kemitchell 2y ago
  Where do statutes or court decisions say that? To my eye, none of the authorities quoted in the article do. It's merely implied.
- fanf2 2y ago
  Right. In the specific case of the Post Office miscarriages of justice, the system as a whole included Horizon central office staff who made manual and sometimes incorrect adjustments to the individual Post Office ledgers, and the discrepancies were later blamed on the postmasters.

chrisjj 2y ago

They are unfortunately conflated in law. " The Law Commission failed to address the strongest arguments against repeal without replacement, …. It ignored the advice of the experts they cited who all argued that the focus of courts should be on the reliability of computer evidence, …. The Law Commission’s comments and conclusions revealed that they had not understood the nature of computers and complex software systems as described in the sources upon which they relied.’ " https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/The-cause-of-the-Post-Office-Horizon-scandal-The-Law-Commission-Judges-Lawyers https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/The-cause-of-the-Post...

deleted 2y ago
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Terr_ 2y ago
I would like to get those commission members to sit down and use a computer program which asks them their name, does a fancy "analyzing" animation, and concludes that that they owe $1 million in fees and are 99% likely to be the perpetrator of an unsolved murder. I mean, hey, the computer is operating correctly, it can't make a mistake, so give me my money and turn yourself in...

graemep 2y ago

"It could be read to say that computers should be presumed to be executing the instructions they're given reliably, unless evidence shows otherwise. It's about malfunction, not misapplication." You are making a technical distinction the law does not make. The law relates to the output - to the evidence generated from the system as a whole. The presumption is that the logic is correct too - which is why it is such a terrible assumption.

kemitchell 2y ago
Where do statutes or court decisions say that? To my eye, none of the authorities quoted in the article do. It's merely implied.
fanf2 2y ago
Right. In the specific case of the Post Office miscarriages of justice, the system as a whole included Horizon central office staff who made manual and sometimes incorrect adjustments to the individual Post Office ledgers, and the discrepancies were later blamed on the postmasters.