The full title is "Why We Demand Perfect Machines Yet Tolerate Human Carnage"

The "Why" makes a difference.

To me, the key is here.

   Empathy is a cognitive tool we use to forgive human error. But a machine’s error is different, like it’s the product of a bad corporate decision or poor coding. Often, there isn’t one person to blame or forgive; we are stuck with an opaque version of fate that is hard to accept. Forgiveness needs an agent that perhaps could have done something differently and can be held responsible. When a person makes a serious mistake, we have somewhere to place the blame and, eventually, someone to absolve.


    People tend to lose confidence in a machine more quickly than in a human when the two make identical mistakes. We prefer a worse human over a better algorithm if the latter has made an error. Behavioral scientists call it algorithm aversion. With no trusted party to explain what happened, visible mistakes dominate people’s judgments of a better system.

"Whataboutism" as an excuse to attack.

I get the feeling that the point is to make machines more like humans in the sense that we empathize with humans, whereas machines are opaque.

And I expect that if that's fone, it will be a sleazy con job.

Having done some programming, I tend to look past the opacity to the designers and coders. And direct my "comments" and feeling of powerlessness [0] to those anonymous people.

While open source can give me a real human to gripe at, I would rather use the open source mechanism to make suggestions, and feel empowered.

Does that put the "humanity" into machines for you? I presume that HAL was closed-source.

[0]Yes, I feel powerless dealing with the home computer when things go off the rails, and while I could write scripts, apps, and flying hot patches, the vendor changes things constantly. And nags me daily, on every damn device when I don't go along.

To a lesser extent this happens with open source, but at least I can see what changed, or as noted above, be part of the whole process.

If my suggestion or code isn't accepted, I can be told why, up to and including "Well, that's because you're an idiot", which has happened in the past, so I can discount the comment, or just try changes on my own.

The chances of any of this actually happening are minuscule, but, getting back on point, it's possible, unlike those black boxes created by anonymous people.