{"id":747,"date":"2008-05-27T07:52:22","date_gmt":"2008-05-27T11:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=747"},"modified":"2008-05-22T14:09:31","modified_gmt":"2008-05-22T18:09:31","slug":"software-is-already-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=747","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Software is Already Policy&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Wired&#8217;s Threat Level blog has a <A HREF=\"http:\/\/blog.wired.com\/27bstroke6\/2008\/05\/computer-progra.html\">report<\/A> on a panel at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in CT last week which explored how computers are setting social policy.<\/p>\n<p>Despite the crude heuristics available in current software, there&#8217;s an unsettling trend in the government toward letting computers make decisions that used to be handled by humans.  One panelist commented on a public benefits computer system that was incorrectly denying Medicaid to eligible applicants by pointing out that the government officials in charge of the system just assumed that it was working properly.  As she said, &#8220;Humans trust computers.  And the programmers didn&#8217;t check for legal compliance; they checked for bugs.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a little creepy, seeing how computers that really aren&#8217;t up to the task are in charge of deciding your fate.  And given the UK&#8217;s recent <A HREF=\"http:\/\/business.timesonline.co.uk\/tol\/business\/industry_sectors\/telecoms\/article3965033.ece\">proposal<\/A> to create a massive database that would hold &#8220;details of every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public&#8221; for a year, the chance for innocent people to be ensnared by buggy software reaches simply hilarious proportions.<\/p>\n<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.asofterworld.com\/index.php?id=210\">This<\/A> is beginning to look pretty plausible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wired&#8217;s Threat Level blog has a report on a panel at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in CT last week which explored how computers are setting social policy. Despite the crude heuristics available in current software, there&#8217;s an unsettling trend in the government toward letting computers make decisions that used to be handled by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}