Also, I don't think that's the full extent of her point here. She's just offering an example of how our pervasive reliance on computers (which often have poorly designed software) has caused trouble for her personally.
Personally, I would consider having to forego food and/or shelter for an unknown length of time -- while a bureaucratic morass is being sorted out, because "the computer said no" -- to be much, much more than just a "temporary inconvenience".
The worst case is that you get handled by people because the computer didn't work, which is the same as if there were no computers.
We might not be optimized for human intervention into these processes, but that's because at the scale we operate at (hundreds of millions of users) it is physically impossible to provide human to human service for everyone.
You are for some reason assuming the article described a failed computer-aided transaction gracefully degrading to a successful human-aided transaction. But that is clearly not what it describes:
> Even then, human clerks and bank tellers would sometimes see the discrepancy, shrug and say “the computer says no” while denying me access to my accounts.
In other words, this was an unsuccessful computer-aided transaction that a service representative did not have permission to override.
If there had been no computers, the service representative would have successfully completed the transaction since there would have been no discrepancy.
So in this example, computer discrepancy + powerless human representative is worse than a representative in a world with no computers.
Edit: wording
If you replace a computer with a piece of paper with a different name on the account, it doesn't make it any easier for a service representative to override.
This isn't a computer problem. It has always been inconvenient to change your name.
It certainly does: * Before computers, most of the roles of the computer were not fulfilled by pieces of paper. It was the teller-of-the-past who was the human front-end and identity verifier/calculator/UI/running policykit instance/etc.
* teller-of-the-past was necessarily trusted to use their discretion to a greater degree than teller-of-the-present
* teller-of-the-past could cache the results of an identity verification on Tuesday to use as the identity verification on Wednesday
* supervisor could bless teller-of-the-past to teach teller-of-the-past2 how to do an end-run around policy foo for edge case bar, where edge case bar involves a specific human or category of humans. (As an aside, the supervisor could do this more quickly than a team of third-party software developers can code, test, and deploy an interface for the same human or small category of humans)
* piece of paper could not lock teller-of-the-past out of completing a transaction with the customer
* even if teller-of-the-past decided not to fulfill the transaction, the equivalent of the computer's identity verification algorithm was probably someone else standing in the same physical bank location who could be asked to help complete the task
> This isn't a computer problem. It has always been inconvenient to change your name.
I think what the author is trying to describe is a problem of lack of human discretion, which is something that wouldn't exist at the scale that it currently does without over-reliance on computers. Gmail and plenty of other services don't degrade to humans at all, so I don't think this is subtle stuff.
A "service representative" (i.e., a real human directly in front of you) could have taken a look at that legal paperwork -- signed by a judge, mind you, and likely imprinted with an official stamp from the clerk -- that Manning was carrying and came to the correct conclusion rather quickly.
At the worse, the rep. might have had to get up, walk 20 feet, and have his/her supervisor also review and approve it. At that point, it would have just taken a few moments to update the information in the computer and the problem would have been resolved permanently.
At least in the cases the author describes, I'm not sure why this would be true. Especially once you consider that, over time, less skilled tellers get hired to fill the position of essentially trusting the computer to do most of the heavy lifting.
Why, for example, would a manager keep granting the same power to the teller to use their own discretion, especially in cases where their discretion contradicts the recommendations of the computer system? The potential to gracefully handle edge cases comes at the much greater risk of the unskilled teller screwing up and costing the bank money.
Tell that to my friend who is presently without health insurance for his whole family because there isn't a human to help him sign up. His employers put too much faith in the computers and that faith is only going to increase until a critical threshold of people (and the right kind of people, that is not peons like me and him) are inconvenienced.
He's also sans a paycheck and delayed on configuring his retirement contributions, costing him thousands in the long run.
A system where only a handful of people have to wade through a bureaucratic mess with alarming regularity can get very dystopian very fast for those few.
If some random person walks into my bank and says they're me, but they've changed their name (and had surgery to change their appearance) I would want that person to be inconvenienced and go through hoops to prove it. I wouldn't want it to be easy for them to assume my identity.
IMO the only thing that matters at the end is whether people _care_ that something like this is wrong and want to fix it, or if they treat it as as "outliers gonna outlie" so they choose not to care.
Without that level of concern, people who don't easily fit in to the mainstream find their lives increasingly considered less and less important.
When she got out, she tries to fix up her accounts.
If someone walks up to a bank years after no activity and wants a name change (and maybe a gender change) on an account should the bank just do it? Probably not without 3rd party verification that the customer has to initiate by filling out some forms and providing evidence.
I'm just speculating but it could have been reasonable for the bank to have declined the request up front.
I bet if it was a woman that got married and changed her last name, it would be super simple.
having some trouble handling edge cases is not dystopian
In most literature it's a society that has a myopic view of people (ie, not dealing with edge cases) resulting in an oppressive society. One where fairness and free agency have been greatly curtailed by a stubborn insistence on a very simplistic view of the world.
1) The "edge cases" typically change slowly over time. If you are an edge case, it's not your turn this year and someone else's turn next year. Your circumstances define you, and are potentially reinforced by your "edge case" status. It's your turn every year, and your entire life becomes a living hell.
2) It takes only a small proportion of edge cases to get a lot of disenfranchised people. For example, 1% of people being edge cases would draw in over 3 million people in the US alone.
It's not like she was permanantly shut out of society. She was temporarily inconvenienced.