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574 points nh43215rgb | 6 comments | | HN request time: 0.454s | source | bottom
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hexbin010 ◴[] No.45781498[source]
> “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien,”

This is "computer says no (not a citizen)". Which is horrifying

They've just created an app to justify what they were already doing right? And the argument will be "well it's a super complex app run by a very clever company so it can't be wrong"?

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GarnetFloride ◴[] No.45782252[source]
Just like IBM said, a computer can't be held responsible for its decisions. Management's been doing this for a long time to justify layoffs and such. This is just the next step.
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1. nostrademons ◴[] No.45784895[source]
Increasingly a human can't be held responsible for their decisions either.

Accountability literally means "being forced to give an account of your decisions", i.e. explain the reasons behind why you made the choices you did. The idea is that when you have a public forum of people with common values, merely being forced to explain yourself will activate mechanisms of shame, guilt, and conformism that keep people inline. Otherwise you'll face the judgment of your peers.

This mechanism breaks down when your peers don't hold common values. If nobody agrees on what right and wrong are, you just find different peers until somebody thinks that what you're doing is right. Or you just don't care and figure solipsism vs. the status quo is just a matter of degree.

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2. potato3732842 ◴[] No.45786910[source]
Exactly. And it's not just ICE. It's every administrative bureaucracy playing favorites. It's flagrant when it's ICE, they're snatching people off the street, that creates a lot of argument. But this workflow was honed, the messaging to the public was figured out, etc, etc, when it was "just" evil bureaucrats catering to mustache twirling evil lobbyists when making rules. Pretty easy to bury something that amounts to driving business in dense technical discussion the public is uninterested in.
3. Terr_ ◴[] No.45787207[source]
Similarly, I like to remind people that "responsibility" isn't necessarily the same as blame or fault, it literally means a duty to respond.
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4. JuniperMesos ◴[] No.45789395[source]
> This mechanism breaks down when your peers don't hold common values. If nobody agrees on what right and wrong are, you just find different peers until somebody thinks that what you're doing is right.

Perhaps because your peers are recent immigrants who are culturally and linguistically foreign to you, and are physically here primarily because the place they are originally from is terrible, rather than because they are actually interested in joining your community and sharing its values.

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5. simtel20 ◴[] No.45790026[source]
So you think that people who have repatriated themselves would not have any interest in adopting some or all of the values of the place they have gone to? That seems really wrong at a lot of levels, though people rarely adopt all of the values of the place they move to (whatever the circumstances).
6. thedrexster ◴[] No.45792576[source]
I'd never considered this before, thank you!