(Okay, this is Demolition Man and Galaxy Quest)

PCs didn't exist back then? You might be forgetting how old we are. Half a century ago was 1976. The Altair 8800 already existed, and one year later in 1977, the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80 arrived.

@rysiek

I am amused that whoever designed the system (presumably human?) did not think about the seems-obvious ways it would get exploited, though. Perhaps they thought the AI would take care of that part. Vibe architecting ftw.

When I was student (half a century ago), I participated in a programming competition. (PCs didn't exist back then; we wrote programs in FORTRAN for a mainframe.) The task was to write an algorithm for a machine that returns change. The input data was how many coins and banknotes of each denomination the machine had, and a list of values it had to return. The algorithm had to be clever enough so that if it couldn't use the minimal amount of coins and banknotes, it had to switch to other amounts, using the available quantities. The condition said "process as many transactions as possible", obviously meaning the above level of cleverness.

Well, one chap took the condition way too literally. His program buffered all the change requests until there were no more and *then* re-ordered them, in order to fulfill as many as possible with the available money/denominations.

While it clearly "optimized" things, in real life it would have lead to idiotic delays, just like this case with drivers waiting for all the pizzas to be ready.

Ultimately the issue here was that "we need something with AI" was the motivation for changing the SW.
Previous SW performed better, because it just did the one thing it was supposed to.
And then the New software tried to be optimizable, with the result that it let couriers do hostile optimization.

@rysiek

#AI #Hype

So let me explain:
1. Gig workers do not get paid nearly enough
2. Pizza Hut decides to deploy some AI boondoggle ("Dragontail") without thinking it through, believing the BS about "optimizing delivery with AI"
3. Gig workers find a way to play the system
4. ???
5. Lawsuit

Gig workers should have been paid more in the first place, but this is still an example of how jumping on the AI hype train can screw you.

But from the perspective of the company that's a problem, and that problem was caused by poorly integrating an AI boondoggle without assessing full extent of consequences.

I am going to *bet* there was someone there saying "but this will cause this exact problem" and was silenced "because AI".

> In a lawsuit filed on May 6 in Texas Business Court, franchisee Chaac Pizza Northeast accused Pizza Hut of forcing stores to adopt Dragontail, a delivery-management platform that Pizza Hut described as using artificial intelligence to "optimize" food delivery, despite what the suit calls obvious incompatibilities with Chaac's business model.

Dragontail is an "AI" startup, so this is a case of integrating an AI boondoggle poorly leading to a bad outcome.

@rysiek

Should be simple.

And yes, the irony of it all is that as bad as deduction is in the domain of reality, it's relatively good in computing.

And the fuckers go and invent a stochastic tool so they can suck just as badly in computing as deduction sucks in the real world.

Amazing. We´re the problem. Humanity is a fuck.