Thursday, December 06, 2018
Surrendering to the machine
A small news item that links into a larger trend:
Wells Fargo misclassified some loan modifications, leading to several hundred foreclosures. Wells Fargo is blaming a computer error for the problem.
This offends my narrow little bookkeeper soul.
Bookkeepers had all sorts of tricks and methods to verify the results of a calculation. Adding machines and calculators made the FIGURING faster, but we always checked the result MANUALLY. Aside from numerical tricks, a human clerk knows the situation. If I was adding up Foreman Bill's meal and motel receipts for the week and the adding machine totaled $14,553.65, I knew something was wrong. Either Bill was cheating or I'd entered the numbers wrong. Bill wasn't the cheating type, so my numbers were the problem. Human pattern recognition is vastly superior to any machine.
In this case a few hundred applications could have been manually reviewed by one clerk in one day, but nobody bothered.
Recently the idea of human checking has disappeared. Tesla owners happily let the car do all the driving, EVEN AFTER its errors have led to close calls and crashes. EXERTING CONTROL over the world is extinct. We are no longer the USERS of machines, no longer able to CHECK or VERIFY that the machine is serving our own PURPOSES. We have abandoned purpose and surrendered to the machine.
Bookkeepers had all sorts of tricks and methods to verify the results of a calculation. Adding machines and calculators made the FIGURING faster, but we always checked the result MANUALLY. Aside from numerical tricks, a human clerk knows the situation. If I was adding up Foreman Bill's meal and motel receipts for the week and the adding machine totaled $14,553.65, I knew something was wrong. Either Bill was cheating or I'd entered the numbers wrong. Bill wasn't the cheating type, so my numbers were the problem. Human pattern recognition is vastly superior to any machine.
In this case a few hundred applications could have been manually reviewed by one clerk in one day, but nobody bothered.
Recently the idea of human checking has disappeared. Tesla owners happily let the car do all the driving, EVEN AFTER its errors have led to close calls and crashes. EXERTING CONTROL over the world is extinct. We are no longer the USERS of machines, no longer able to CHECK or VERIFY that the machine is serving our own PURPOSES. We have abandoned purpose and surrendered to the machine.Labels: Metrology
¶ 7:30 AM
