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The Man Who Was Fired By a Machine (bbc.com)
"It wasn't the first time my key card failed, I assumed it was time to replace it." So began a sequence of events that saw Ibrahim Diallo fired from his job, not by his manager but by a machine. From a report: He has detailed his story in a blogpost which he hopes will serve as a warning to firms about relying too much on automation. "Automation can be an asset to a company, but there needs to be a way for humans to take over if the machine makes a mistake," he writes. The story of Mr Diallo's sacking by machine began when his entry pass to the Los Angeles skyscraper where his office was based failed to work, forcing him to rely on the security guard to allow him entry. "As soon as I got to my floor, I went to see my manager to let her know. She promised to order me a new one right away." And that was just the beginning. Mr Diallo soon realized that he was logged out of his work system and "inactive" status was appearing next to his name, his colleagues told him. He was then informed by his recruiter, who was just as puzzled, that his contract has been terminated. Next day, says Mr Diallo, he was locked out of every system, except his Linux machine. Things continued to go south, as two people approached Mr Diallo to escort him out of the building. The story continues: It took Mr Diallo's bosses three weeks to find out why he had been sacked. His firm was going through changes, both in terms of the systems it used and the people it employed. His original manager had been recently laid off and sent to work from home for the rest of his time at the firm and in that period he had not renewed Mr Diallo's contract in the new system. After that, machines took over -- flagging him as an ex-employee. "All the necessary orders are sent automatically and each order completion triggers another order. For example, when the order for disabling my key card is sent, there is no way of it to be re-enabled. "Once it is disabled, an email is sent to security about recently dismissed employees. Scanning the key card is a red flag. The order to disable my Windows account is also sent. There is also one for my Jira account. And on and on."
It's a failure of management to overdepend upon automation without a human checkpoint on a very important process.
According to the summary, his (human) manager failed to renew his contract in the new system, during their changeover.
So a machine did not fire him. A human failed to renew his contract, and the machine obediently carried out the steps that it should carry out when that happened.
The narrative about an evil AI here is far more interesting than what actually happened.
The individual responsible for keeping him flagged as an active resource failed to perform that activity and he was garbage collected.
A human being forgot to renew his contract in the new HR system.
"His firm was going through changes, both in terms of the systems it used and the people it employed.
His original manager had been recently laid off and sent to work from home for the rest of his time at the firm and in that period he had not renewed Mr Diallo's contract in the new system."
And the problem was sorted out (too long, too faceless, perhaps), and he was allowed back to work.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the AC that will believe everything a troll writes.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
“Yeeeeah, we’re gonna need to go ahead and move you downstairs into storage B.”
Milton had actually been laid off five years prior, but through a glitch in accounting, continued to receive a paycheck.
Wow, you can guess how many companies in which an un-renewed contract worker would NOT be detected properly? This company is impressively integrated. I bet they have a first class internal auditing team who had to hassle system owners for years before this was all properly configured.
This is a non-story. It's good security practice to designate end dates to terminate credentials you know are there for temporary work (which I assume his was since they mention a contract and it had an expiry date and renewal was needed). Kudos to the company for having all their systems integrated such as building access and workstation logins. This was just an oversight on management when they fired his previous manager.
What pisses me off is the headline. No... an AI Boss didn't determine it would be more profitable if he didn't work there. It didn't go through the steps to fire him and send him to the Employment Line, write him his final check, and spank his ass on the way out. The system did what it was designed to do, and only when they realized they fired the guy who was in charge of renewing his contract, did they fix it. Simple.
What they could have done better is succession management to make sure the manager who was supposed to renew the contract had his responsibilities covered.
The process described could just as easily have happened 50 years ago in a large enough operation driven by set procedures and compartmentalized people who have specific, required action in response to specific input handed to them. Just another case of With-A-Computer-Ism.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Please report to the Aperture Science Extended Relaxation Center.
Having a human controlled check point in the process (by HR for instance) would just allow dismissed contractors access to the system
Perhaps they should rehire him. Perhaps at a better rate
The summary is not that detailed to see it outright but his contract did not expire. In any legal system this would mean he would have to be paid for the time he could have not worked because his dismissal was not formally correct or rather there have been no dismissal. In fact it was the company that failed to provide him working conditions while his contract was legally running. As said summary is open about that so maybe one should not make too many assumptions. The summary however indicates that the company in fact did not want to fire him and the termination was a fault. Yet the management did not manage (!!!) to fix that problem for 3 weeks. What is not written in the summary but in an original (linked) article is even more interesting - his colleagues grew distant because of his absence even after he has explained what has happened. This means we are done as a society - well groomed to be governed by drones and it makes no difference whether these drones are meatbags or automatic systems working according to some SW code. It is really a telling sign of failure at humanity to not be able to keep the guy working while the system is being investigated and fixed.
That so many of commenters here show complete understanding for the failed system ('working as it should' and other nonsense) is another telling sign of decline. OC this does not mean civilization will end and we all will die. There is a point in time still in front of us where failure of one system may lead to domino effect - no need for superior artificial self-aware intelligence - just a set of actions that have executed faster that they could be stopped.
Such situation can make losses especially high in highly developed and interconnected societies.
I would like to come back to the enthusiasm with which we accept orders from authority these days. Nothing has changed since 1933 I guess. Even if I was told many times that milgram experiment was a failure in itself and its results could not be used to explain anything anywhere else (only Germans are like this and other some garbage). Well nothing besides that fact that there is no human telling you orders but the system doing that instead.
As said summary is open about that so maybe one should not make too many assumptions.
The summary appears to quote TFA and says that his contract was not renewed. You don't have to renew a contract if it is still valid. Thus, the summary is not open about this, it is pretty clearly saying his contract either expired or "his contract has been terminated."
Neither his still working ex-manager (who was sent to work from home for the remainder of his time with the company, thus not completely terminated at the time), or his new manager renewed his contract. We don't know why, but we do know that his new manager is apparently not competent enough with the system to be able to look up the employment status of her charges. Othewise, she would have seen "contract terminated" and known what the problem was. His "recruiter" could look this up, so we know it was online, and that's the point when the correction should have started.
That so many of commenters here show complete understanding for the failed system ('working as it should' and other nonsense)
The system worked as it should. His contract was either expired or terminated and not renewed. At that point he is no longer an employee. It was not "a machine" that fired him, it is the acts of his managers that resulted in this situation. Two people. One of them had no reason to care -- which is why you don't keep him online and "working from home" in the first place. One of them was incompetent.
What do you expect the system to do? Should it keep allowing access to company resources by a terminated employee? Or should the process be automated so a disgruntled fired person cannot continue to access the company computers when a human makes a mistake and doesn't cancel accounts and cards? We already know his "current" manager is incapable of using the computer to manage her people, so we can assume she would have been equally incompetent at completing the discharge process and turning off access. That's why we automate such things.
I would like to come back to the enthusiasm with which we accept orders from authority these days. Nothing has changed since 1933 I guess.
Oh, for pete's sake. This has nothing to do with "authority" or Hitler. Two managers failed to do their jobs to keep someone they wanted employed in that status. One didn't care and didn't need to, the other might have cared but wasn't able to find her ass with both hands. That's it. It's not machines taking over the world ordering humans to do their every bidding. It's not a malicious dictatorship killing humans because they aren't performing to his standards. It was a MISTAKE, apparently, made by humans.
Does that mean that this guy has to just sit back and accept it? Of course not. He can sue for various employment law violations, I am sure. If they still want him to work for them, the company can "rehire" him, and I might recommend he negotiate a raise in the process. Maybe he wants to assume that the company is screwed up enough that he'd never work there again, or he can assume that it was a mistake made by a couple of under-abled managers and get past it. From the fact that he's hyping this as "fired by a machine", I doubt the latter would happen.
It's a bad thing that happened, of course, but it is NOT "fired by a machine", nor is it related to 1933.
This is a non-story.
Speaking of "stories," I do not understand why no one has yet mentioned Gordon Dickson's classic short "Computers Don't Argue" from 1965.
Magazine reproduction
Text version (but atrocious background color)
Sure, it's interesting that this happened, but we still have no idea what company he worked for.
I did a bit of googling, Ibrahim Diallo is a much more common name than I'd have thought. I couldn't find anything.
This is not the sort of thing that we need to be talking about in the abstract. Sure, that's nice and all, but it doesn't really get the attention where it needs to be. We need to know the company.
The way you get this sort of thing fixed is to NAME AND SHAME. Drag that company's name through the mud, so that management at other companies will see the negative publicity, see that screwups on this level have a real impact on a company, and think about how their process works.
This story will be technical noise to CEOs. Having a company's name in the headlines for screwing somebody over like this will get their attention. Think about it, did a song about "An Airline Broke My Guitar" get attention? Nope, but "United Breaks Guitars" did.
The company needs to be in the headline for their screwup. Name and shame is the way to go.
I was kinda hoping for the "auto layoff thing" from Idiocracy. So many things from that movie are slowly becoming true, to the point where people could probably take plot points from that movie and turn them into CNN headlines without people noticing that they are from a movie.