I think people underestimate the long tail of most problems. Even if it’s 98% good, what do you do with that last 2%? The same applies for self-driving and other computer vision related technologies.
Realistically, keep running Utah until the next round of sweeping budget cuts comes, then cook up some reason to return/destroy the remaining 2% as "undeliverable" and shut it down. Good service always gets sacrificed to save 2%
I remember a patio11 thread about exactly this — once your operations reach a certain scale, even a 0.1% of cases problem takes a whole department to deal with
Shows that some things just can't be provided by the private sector and need a govt agency like the USPS. A private corp would have shut this down long ago and just required in their terms&conditions that people write in an easily OCR-able style, else the letter gets dropped without notice. Letting the govt take care of this gives people more freedom - for example the freedom to get old and have a handwriting that a machine has issues with.
