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My class read a science fiction story in CS about a guy getting executed on death row for a late library book in a comedy of errors where a series of automated systems glitch out and a detached bureaucracy is slow to react. Or something like that.

I feel like it should be required reading to protect against "automate all the things" hubris.




Sounds somewhat reminiscent of the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. Basically a fly dies and gets caught in a teletype machine, causing the name on an arrest warrant to be misprinted. This snowballs into all sorts of darkly humorous and depressing hijinks.


Literally a bug in the system.


Basically a modernized version of the premise of "The Trial" by Franz Kafka. An unknown authority charges the character with a unstated crime and bureaucracy chugs along on errors and assumptions.


Do you remember what it was called?


I had a fuzzy memory of this story from years back, and recently stumbled across it recently on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don't_Argue




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