Slashdot Mirror
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.
In accordance with our records, you should be dead now. Please do the needful...
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Gen 5:5
Methuselah 969 Gen 5:25
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.