The Weekly Weird #7

AI on crack(s), UK Post Office workers got Fujit-screwed, Free Speech Union vs. Lloyds Bank, and a mind-blowing legal opinion

Jan 11, 2024

Hello everyone!

It’s that time of the week again, where we warm our hands together at the dumpster fire of modern life and share a tongue-cluck or a chuckle at the latest doings abroad in the land.

AI On Crack(s)

The United Kingdom is getting some “world’s first” attention for agreeing to deploy an AI-powered robot to repair potholes on its roads.

According to Reemul Balla of Sky News, ARRES (Autonomous Road Repair System) “will foray on to the roads of Hertfordshire for a test early this year.” In the video in the Sky News article, the robot looks like the squished offspring of a Cybertruck and a DeLorean. I hope they tested its resilience to graffiti and kicky passers-by at the lab.

Balla’s article ends with a definitive assessment of the cause of the long-standing pothole issues faced by British drivers: It’s the rain.

The UK is burdened with potholes due to high traffic levels and its cold and wet climate during winter months.

The company behind the road-repairing robot is Robotiz3d, a start-up based near Liverpool. Don’t worry about the trouble you just had saying the name of the company in your head, I don’t know how to pronounce it either.

Quoted by UK Research and Innovation, Robotiz3d’s CEO and founder Lisa Layzell said:

This is the first autonomous technology of this kind developed specifically to tackle the pothole crisis which plagues many parts of the country, and which is estimated to have cost more than £1 billion to repair over the last decade.

If only they had an AI-enabled robot that could help you around the house as well, right? Maybe an AI home assistant rolling around on your heels, “learning your home”?

Presenting Samsung’s Ballie:

We really are defining ‘help’ in an odd way, unless the problem I’m having is too much privacy and no giant plastic tennis ball with a built-in projector following me around the house.

Speaking of trusting software…

UK Post Office Workers Got Fujit-screwed

Mr Bates vs. The Post Office, a recently-released series on ITV in the UK starring Toby Jones, dramatises the Post Office Scandal (also called the Horizon Scandal), a long-running saga in which innocent people were accused of and in some cases convicted of criminal offences because of malfunctioning software.

Computer Weekly (link above) provides a pithy tale-in-two-paragraphs:

In 1999, the Post Office’s single shareholder, the UK government, began automating accounting processes at about 14,000 Post Office branches. This saw the introduction of a centralised computer system from supplier Fujitsu, which all branches were connected to. This system replaced traditional paper-based accounting practices.
But problems ensued, and there was a sudden increase in the number of subpostmasters suffering unexplained accounting shortfalls. Rather than investigate the problems and fix them, the Post Office blamed the branch operators, many of whom it prosecuted for financial crimes, with many more made bankrupt and sacked.

This has been described as “one of the most widespread miscarriages of justice in UK history” by The Guardian. For a country whose law enforcement and media community institutionally ignored and covered up the activities of a TV and radio personality who was a pederast for half a century, that is really saying something.

Here’s Toby Jones on the radio talking about the scandal, and the show.

More from Computer Weekly, who broke the first story on the scandal:

For 15 years after the roll-out of Horizon, the Post Office – which has private investigation and prosecution powers with no need for police involvement – prosecuted more than 700 subpostmasters for crimes such as theft and false accounting. Hundreds of subpostmasters were sent to prison and many more received punishments such as being forced to do community service and having to wear electronic tags. They lived their lives with criminal records.
Hundreds were made bankrupt, losing their livelihood, and many struggled after being forced to pay the Post Office to cover shortfalls that didn’t exist outside the Horizon system. The lives of the victims and their families were severely impacted, with several suicides linked to the scandal and many cases of illness caused by stress.

Can it get even more gross? It sure can:

The Post Office was determined to keep a lid on the Horizon problems. To do this, it instructed staff in its call centre, which was the first contact point for subpostmasters having problems, to tell callers they were the only ones experiencing problems.
It went further than this by using its legal teams and deep pockets to defend itself against accusations, in court if necessary. It bragged about stopping subpostmasters from “jumping on the Horizon bashing bandwagon” when it silenced them. It also lied to journalists, politicians and anybody else who questioned the robustness of the Horizon system.

The show has been a hit, and seemingly in response to the publicity, the British government has said it will pass a new law overturning the convictions of the affected individuals en masse, a controversial decision to overrule the judiciary considered necessary “because it was taking far too long to resolve cases individually.” People are still in prison for fraud they didn’t commit, because the government-owned Post Office lied about the efficacy of its software, but now they can look forward to being free “by the end of the year.”

Channel 4 News covered the story today:

Obviously, now that this has all come to light, Fujitsu, the company that provided the software, has been penalised, forced to pay compensation, and run out of the country on a rail, right?

Wrong.

According to the Daily Mirror, since 2012, Fujitsu have apparently bagged £6.8 billion in public sector contracts and “is still one of the Government’s “strategic suppliers”, which typically means it receives over £100million in contracts per year.”

Quoted in the Mirror article is Tony Collins, previously of Computer Weekly (emphasis mine):

Telling civil servants they can’t use Fujitsu is like telling them they can’t have lunch. Fujitsu is intricately woven into the fabric of the government machine. The Government couldn’t operate without them.

Meanwhile, the UK government, as the proud owner of the Post Office, has paid out around £138 million in compensation. Let’s hope they weren’t using Fujitsu’s accounting software when they did it.

In other compensation news…

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Free Speech Union vs. Lloyds Bank

The Free Speech Union in Britain has won its “biggest legal victory to date” against Lloyds Bank. Carl Borg-Neal, a dyslexic bank manager at Lloyds, has been awarded compensation (of between £450,000 and £800,000 depending on who you believe1) for unfair dismissal and disability discrimination over his use of the n-word during an online workplace racial sensitivity training session.

From The Critic’s article on the judgment and the background of the case:

Thinking partly about rap music, he asked how as a line manager he should handle a situation where he heard someone from an ethnic minority use a word that might be considered offensive if used by a white person. Met with a puzzled look from the trainer, he…

He said it.

Carl didn’t receive a response to his “clumsy” question. In fact, he was angrily berated by the trainer. He tried to apologise for any offence, but was told if he spoke again he would be thrown off the course.
…
After the course, the trainer claimed she was so offended by the use of the n-word that she was too sick to work and took five days off — at which point the provider then complained to Lloyds Bank.

From HR Grapevine, which is a publication that I now know exists:

During the hearing, Lloyds representatives admitted that Mr Borg-Neal had not intended to cause any hurt with his use of the N-word, but argued they were right to sack him because he should have known better than “to use the full word in a professional environment”.
However, it was stated at the tribunal that Mr Borg-Neal’s question was well-intentioned and relevant, in regards to how to handle a situation of racially offensive language in the workplace. There was no suggestion that he was taking an opportunity to utter an abusive term under cover of a question.

You can find the Court documents here and here.

Onward to a courtroom across the pond…

A Mind-Blowing Legal Opinion

Precedent is a big deal in the legal profession, and United States District Judge Gary R. Brown seems to have set an odd one. On the final page of his opinion in the case of DePietro v. Levitt LLP, he used the ‘mind blown’ emoji to describe “flagrant overcharging” by the Plaintiff’s lawyers to the tune of $51 per text message.

On his law blog, Eric Goldman (not Bob Loblaw) gives a considered read on whether this constitutes a true judicial milestone or not:

I hesitate to declare this the first time a U.S. judge has used an emoji to articulate their legal conclusion, but I can’t think of another example. The closest I can think of is when the 9th Circuit displayed the thumbs-up and heart emojis, instead of characterizing them textually, to refer to social media reactions. See Garnier v. O’Connor-Ratcliff. That was a pure word substitution. Here, the judge went further and actually integrated an emoji in his judicial “analysis.” That may have broken some new judicial ground.

What’s next? Weak arguments shot down with a 💩? 🤔 to denote the Court’s askance stance? 🔥 for a well-reasoned point?

Please submit your own proposed emojis in the comments along with your legal definitions, I look forward to seeing them.