Automated systems

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Steel
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Automated systems

Post by Steel »

Having just read this article I saw at the bottom how there is a statement that if the identification technology (used to count how many people were in a car in a multiple passenger lane) was not 100% reliable then it should not be used as there was a risk of fining people wrongly. The article also says that using police officers to do the task is about 60% effective, but the cameras could be about 85% effective.

This got me thinking how in general if there is a problem, then an automated solution to many people needs to always be 100% effective, even if the current solution is 50%. Were it a case of a manned solution that was only say 10% more effective there wouldnt be any question (bar costs etc) of adoptign the new approach. A similar thought process goes behind perceptions of train safety and airline safety too i think.

Is there any good reasoning behind these sorts of preferences for human control? Or are a lot people just scared of not having control in itself? I'd personally rather have a random 0.001% risk of crashing in a computer controlled car than a 0.01% chance of being in a crash driving myself.
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FireNexus
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Post by FireNexus »

If a human screws up then that is a limited number of screwups. If a system is flawed causing a screwup, then it potentially causes problems for every single event under its control, since the same system would be used across the board. I'd like to name this "The Microsoft Principal".

When dealing with human life (ala plane and train security), that makes me a little nervous. When policing carpool lanes, I'm not particularly worried about it.
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PeZook
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Post by PeZook »

Procedures could easily be designed to counter the inefficiency in this particular case ; Just have the system take a picture of the car, datestamp it and e-mail to a central processing centre. If a system decides the car should be fined, a human operator looks at the associated picture and either flags it "yea" or "nay".

The pictures could also be mailed out along with the fines, so that you could contest the fine.

Expecting an automated system to have a 0% failure rate is completely retarded.
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