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Computer Program Prevents 116-Year-Old Woman From Getting Pension (theguardian.com)
Bruce66423 quotes a report from The Guardian: Born at the turn of the past century, Maria Felix is old enough to remember the Mexican Revolution -- but too old to get the bank card needed to collect her monthly 1,200 pesos ($63) welfare payment. Felix turns 117 in July, according to her birth certificate, which local authorities recognize as authentic. She went three months without state support for poor elderly Mexicans after she was turned away from a branch of Citibanamex in the city of Guadalajara for being too old, said Miguel Castro, development secretary for the state of Jalisco. Welfare beneficiaries now need individual bank accounts because of new transparency rules, Castro said. "They told me the limit was 110 years," Felix said with a smile in the plant-filled courtyard of her small house in Guadalajara. In an emailed statement, Citibanamex, a unit of Citigroup Inc, said Felix's age exceeded the "calibration limits" of its system and it was working to get her the bank card as soon as possible. It said it was adjusting its systems to avoid a repeat of the situation.
The limit clearly should have been 256 from the beginning.
Surely you meant "AI" or "deep neural net", not just a "computer program"? It is 2017.
There are two issues. First, apparently no programmer on the job was smart enough to consider people over 100 years old. Second, the bank could have just created a temporary account for her claiming she was born in 1901 with a note attached to fixed the date once the system had been patched. Sending her away rather than just fudging the birth date was a pretty foolish thing to do.
because somebody was stupid enough to decide that nobody could live longer than 110, despite evidence to the contrary, and they were stupid enough to include that limit in their software in such a way that couldn't be easily modified.
The computer program isn't preventing anything, it's a bank that wrote shitty software that is preventing it. Do not blame machines for doing exactly what you told them to do!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
There is no way to take every edge case into account when designing systems. She is clearly an edge case. Why is this even here?
Because when you think “this will work for 99% of cases” the corollary is “the rest of 1% can go fudge themselves”. Sometimes that is fine, but if a person can't get their pension, that is certainly not ok. Consider this a cautionary tale for programmers.
How about someone in the bank just puts here age in like 10 years younger than she is, what's the big deal if their system thinks he is 106 instead of 116?
Someone is new!
This mentality frustrates me to no end. While it may be possible that a single line of code change, or hell even just a minor tweak to a DB field property can be made, this is a freaking Financial application!!!
No change can be made in an hour and actually deployed. There is testing and procedures that must be adhered to in order to maintain a level of quality and stability. If you say, yeah but this is isolated, then why have quality procedures in place to begin with? Sure if this was some free do nothing app, or say, didn't involve peoples MONEY, then yeah feel free to play around in production.
I used to be of the mindset, go go go! Then I got wiser and through experience learned that there is a time to go fast and a time to follow protocol. You too will one day learn this lesson as we all have/will.
Now, with all that said. This should have never been an issue to begin with! It is obvious poor decision making and or lack of experience is to blame for this.
In accordance with our records, you should be dead now. Please do the needful...
This is in Mexico, it has nothing to do with America. (Though I wouldn't put it past any programmers here to miss the same edge case.)
Because validation rules like this are actually pretty important when it comes to detecting and preventing fraud. The failure here was not that the software could not deal with here being more than 110.
That is sufficiently an edge case that as frequently as it comes up a call form a bank manager to HQ where they can say something like well enter the date a 1/1/1900 than and we will have an engineer update the record to the correct value ASAP should work.
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First, apparently no programmer on the job was smart enough to consider people over 100 years old.
Erm RTFS maximum age was set at 110 years. And how do we know this arbitrary limit wasn't defined in in the damned BR's
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There's almost certainly no way to change that datum as a teller or manager (your birthdate can never change!!), and quite possibly the developers aren't allowed to adjust data in production - even with scripts and to fix broken data. It's probably "all too hard" so there's no point trying (also, anti-fraud, don't trust anyone, etc etc)
The old testament is not a valid historical document. Also, it takes quite a bit of motivated reasoning to think that we are anywhere near pushing maximum human lifespans to 1000 or even 200. Not going to happen. Everyone reading this now will be dead and gone in no less than 115 years. Get over it. To return to the topic, though, the limit should be realistic for purposes of fraud detection. You wouldn't want families going on collecting great-great-grandma's pension long after she is dead. As others have pointed out, it is a design flaw that there is no way of handling edge cases with manual oversight, though.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
How about someone in the bank just puts here age in like 10 years younger than she is, what's the big deal if their system thinks he is 106 instead of 116?
Well, the bank is usually allowed to issue IDs that many people who don't have a driver's license and don't want to carry their passport use. Intentionally falsifying records like that is not something I'd do without explicit approval from my boss in writing, because a note is unlikely to prevent such false documents from being issued. And that would probably escalate all the way to legal, who might have to check whatever agreements they have with the government, who will then probably say no. It's just not worth my own skin to be customer friendly.
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What DO they teach them in Sunday School these days...
Programmers don't generally throw in arbitrary rules like that...
Like hell they don't. They do it all the time unintentionally and sometimes very much intentionally. The entire Y2K problem was from tens of thousands of programmers arbitrarily taking short cuts in their programming creating arbitrary rules in regards to what seemed like corner cases at the time. Happens all the time, especially when the programmers don't fully understand the problem they are being asked to solve. The software we use to run our company is positively riddled with arbitrary restrictions which interfere with the efficient conduct of our business. The guys who programmed it are smart enough and decent folks but they don't actually use the software themselves so they don't really understand the limitations they are creating along the way.
I'd say it's more likely they were given a specific business rule that prevented people over 100 from claiming pension cheques to reduce a fraud vector.
Highly unlikely. Laziness and/or incompetence are far more likely origins of this problem.
Probably because it's not arbitrary; most people don't live to be 110, and everybody knows you're supposed to perform sanity checking. According to a quick google search (the height of scholarly rigor,) there's maybe 300 people in the world who are older than 110 years. The most wild estimate is 600.
On the other hand, fraud is a real thing, not to mention straight up human error; somebody dies, they don't get taken out of the system, so the money keeps going out.
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