Artificial Intelligence = Real Stupidity?

[aspidites]

I've been putting books up on eBay, and recently sold one to a gentleman in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I packed the book up, and trundled down to the Post Office in Newark to ship it off. I told the clerk that I wanted to ship the parcel by Media Mail (what used to be 4th class book rate), and gave her the ZIP code for the address

Comments

[doubleplus]

Well, you know, there's an old programmer saying that every "computer error" involves at least two human errors, one of which is blaming it on the computer...

(Which is to say, this almost certainly was a human error, just much earlier in the process.)

[aspidites]

Well, yes, I know that a computer can only give information a human puts into it, and that a computer is not an AI... but I was bemused not only by the error - which argues both a really poor knowledge of the US territories on someone's part and zero QC of the work - but by the way the computer seemed to "change its mind".

[doubleplus]

Yeah, it's pretty bizarre both to have that error *and* for there to be a way around it in the system. I'd hate to think how convoluted that software is.