Situation :
A couple years ago Patricia returned to the UK to take up an academic position at a British University. She had been out in UK for over 20 years working for universities at number of countries, and had a good professional employment record. She decided to open a bank account with one of the large banks that had branch on the campus.
She met the bank manager, was given the necessary forms, duly completed them. A few days later she returned to the bank to open her account. Much to her surprise, she was told that she could only have cash account, i.e., she not be given any bank cards, cheque book, or the like, nor could she have any overdraft facility.
Patricia again met with the bank manager as she naturally felt there must have been some misunderstanding. Key points here are that she already had a bank account in the UK since her student days (although this had been largely unused during her years away), she owed no money on credit cards or the like, was UK citizen, and had a good track record with bank overseas. In addition, her salary from the university was to be paid into her account each month.
Despite her explaining these points, the bank manager was adamant that she could only have cash accounts. When asked to explain this decision, the bank manager indicated that it was not in fact her decision, but a decision made by an expert system. The bank always used this computer technology when making decisions about opening accounts for new clients, and in fact the bank manager could not overrule the restrictions that the expert systems imposed. In short, the expert system was empowered in the decision-making process to such an extent that it actually replaced the human decision-making process. The bank manager went on to explain that the problem was that the expert system had not previously encountered a person with Patricia’s particular background. And the key point to the computer was the extensive years of residency outside the UK.
Question:
To what extent do you think it is appropriate to replace the human decision-making process with the computer technologies such as expert systems?
• For me I think , it is inappropriate to be dependent on the computer technologies such as expert’s system it is because there are some things that expert’s system won’t do in human decision-making process considering: for instance, can expert’s system understand some explanations in a situations by which only human can do. It is not all the time computer technologies such as expert’s system can managed all the things that can human decision-making process can do, because computer controlled system may cause some problems or troubles in a company or in a business and may lead into a lose of clients and income.
During the conversation Patricia asked the bank manager whether she felt that it was appropriate for the expert system to be empowered in this way. The response she obtained was that it was a great idea because computers do not make mistakes. What do you think about this comment? Do computers make mistakes? Is any computerized system free from mistakes? Should we be educating people to believe that computers are infallible, are computers infallible? What do you think are the ramifications of believing in infallible computerized systems?
• For me, I would agree to his comment that computer do not make mistake but if the computer user inputs a wrong data then It would be that the data input into the computer is not reliable or inconsistent especially if it is done in a computerized system. On my opinion, I think we should not be educating people that computers are reliable it is because as an intelligent beings, we can often detect that something happened out of the ordinary has occurred which has not been previously anticipated and then take appropriate actions. Computers will only do what they have programmed to do, even if it is task to perform a dangerous act.
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