Re:Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona priso...
by kodah on Monday February 22, 2021 @07:27PM
(#26232457)
I never disagreed with the idea that humans should be involved. I was concerned about the use of "responsible".
Let's be specific who you're comparing a judge to though. A guard, social worker, or bureaucrat with the guard being most likely. A guard probably has a lot of things to do on any given day, administrative exercises would only be part of them. The same could be said of a social worker. This is why I cautioned against making someone who is likely underpaid and doesn't have much time capital "responsible" for something as important as how long someone stays in the system.
Usually, in any case where a bureaucracy could generate a Kafkaesque nightmare scenario, just forcing a human being to actually decide whether to implement the computer's decision or not (rather than having their job be "do whatever the computer tells you"), will remove the Kafkaesque-ness. (This is, in fact, the whole reason we have courts: to put a human—a judge—in the critical path for applying criminal law to people.)