This is an unbelievable story. A true story, not some futuristic SciFi darkness, but a thing that actually happened. Top of the front page on Hacker News this morning.
This reads like the screenplay from Brazil.
The machine fired me
This is an unbelievable story. A true story, not some futuristic SciFi darkness, but a thing that actually happened. Top of the front page on Hacker News this morning.
This reads like the screenplay from Brazil.
That happens at least twice in the story. The future can be scary, but the human override element can be too.
There is absolutely nothing about this story that is “unbelievable,” Dave.
Sadly, Mo is right – this is all too believable. And here’s the problem… you WANT automation to shut off a fired employee’s access to corporate systems. It eliminates human error (“Oh, I forgot to disable access to the highly sensitive $SYSTEM when Jack was let go”) and if someone is let go for cause. That really isn’t the problem. It’s that no one could say “Wait a second, this happened in error, reinstate Jack” and have everything turned back on. Sure, that could take a day or two… but this case took *3 weeks* which is insane.
Yep, and it’s why corporations are so gung-ho about Single Sign-On as a feature (and why software vendors can charge so much more money for providing or integrating with it).
If the money’s unlimited, tying everything to Active Directory/LDAP/whatever avoids mistakes in both directions and makes firing or reinstating someone effectively a one-click process. But being as money is frequently not unlimited, there’s a lot of “chain of future unspoken automated doom” like Ibrahim ran into deployed in the wild.