When computer glitches ruin lives
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 26 April 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Imagine losing your home, your job or your reputation, all because of a computer error. We speak to people who say that's exactly what happened to them.
Kim Duncan and her children lost their family home in the US after Kim's bank Wells Fargo mistakenly said she didn't qualify for a loan modification she needed to keep up with her repayments. Meanwhile in the UK, the Post Office is being litigated by former employees who were fired and in some cases went to prison after being accused of fraud - they claim because of a bug in the Post Office's accounting software.
Manuela Saragosa asks computer science expert Lindsay Marshall of Newcastle University whether glitches like these are unavoidable. Do they have to be so damaging, and are they likely to become an ever more common bane of our lives?
(Photo: Businessman sitting in a data centre looking frustrated. Credit: AKodisinghe/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | 60 seconds. |
| 0:01.0 | I thought, wow, what if I had gotten myself into? |
| 0:04.1 | Right to 1202, we copy it. |
| 0:05.7 | I'm looking at my displays and I am in big trouble. |
| 0:10.0 | 13 minutes to the moon from the BBC World Service coming soon. |
| 0:20.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragossa. |
| 0:26.3 | Coming up, computer says no. |
| 0:28.9 | There was a computer glitch and I lost my home for four years. |
| 0:34.4 | I lived with the fact thinking that I did this to the children. |
| 0:38.7 | And no one wanted to help because they looked at me as if I had done this to the kids, that this was my fault. |
| 0:45.2 | When computer glitches wreck lives, that's coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:54.5 | It's a truth, more or less universally acknowledged |
| 0:57.5 | that computers and software algorithms play an increasingly important role in our lives. |
| 1:03.1 | Mostly, we're completely unaware of them, until something goes wrong. |
| 1:07.1 | We'll come to that in just a moment. |
| 1:08.9 | First, though, how much of our lives do algorithms |
| 1:11.3 | have a say in? Harvard PhD and data scientist Kathy O'Neill wrote a whole book about it a couple of |
| 1:17.4 | years ago. So algorithms are everywhere and most of them are benign or even positive. And a lot of them |
| 1:22.7 | are just unimportant. But there are a class of algorithms, which I call weapons of math destruction, |
| 1:26.6 | that have three characteristics that when you put them together, make them alarming. |
| 1:31.8 | They make decisions that are very important to people's lives. |
| 1:34.9 | Like that could be whether they get a job or whether they get a loan or even how long they go to jail. |
... |
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