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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.
“Yeeeeah, we’re gonna need to go ahead and move you downstairs into storage B.”
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.