3 ms·

The Post Office scandal at its core was a political/legal problem, not an engineering one. Software needs to be transparent, a human expert worker needs to be

• tremon 2y ago
  > Software needs to be transparent, a human expert worker needs to be able to verify the result a software generates within reasonable time. This is becoming more and more important as the AI industry is pushing non-deterministic computing further and further. There will be court cases where the full automated decision chain will be called into question, and a default assumption of "well, we don't have any logs so we should assume the software did the right thing" terrifies me.
  • Terr_ 2y ago
    The magic word that always pops up to me is "liability." Even speaking from an IC/non-managerial place, far too many technical problems in businesses are really just symptom-alleviation (or worse, performative look-I'm-doing-something theater) for a deeper problem which involves misaligned incentives for humans.
• hnick 2y ago
  Some of the sites we work on are insurance based. We save every step of the calculation (inputs and outputs, e.g. rates and sub-totals). An administrative user can see the entire calculation from start to end, including overrides at various steps (e.g. a manual discount), and breakdowns per state or item insured if appropriate. This seems like the acceptable bare minimum to me, rather than just showing a magic number. And it definitely helps to expose bugs.