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Just watched my boss dismiss an engineer's safety concern about our new AI sorting bot
Last week at the warehouse in Tulsa, our lead engineer pointed out that the vision system on the new bot misidentifies black objects as empty space about 15 percent of the time. My boss literally said "it's fine, the safety protocols will override before it crushes anyone's hand." I asked him what happens when a person with dark skin leans in to fix a jam and the system doesn't see them. He just shrugged and walked off. Anyone else dealing with managers who won't listen to actual technical warnings about AI safety?
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dixon.james1mo ago
That reminds me of a guy I used to work with over at FedEx, he pointed out a similar blind spot in their sorting arm and the manager told him to just "stand back more" until someone actually did get clipped and the company almost got sued into the ground. These guys never learn until something bad actually happens.
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the_thomas1mo ago
...wait, 15 percent? That's not even a borderline case, that's a straight up failure rate. I'm sitting here trying to wrap my head around how anyone with a technical background could just shrug that off... I mean, you basically told him the machine is blind to a whole chunk of reality and he just walked away? That's the kind of thing that gets people killed, not just bruised. And the fact that he specifically ignored the real world example of a person with dark skin getting hurt... man, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen, and it's gonna be a nasty one when it does.
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carter.joseph1mo ago
@the_thomas nailed it, that vision flaw is a 15% blind spot waiting to crush someone.
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