software

A dark-skinned man in glasses gestures as he speaks. Above him, a wall of text reads: "It's perfect software for criminal sentencing, except for a few bugs where it metes out harsher punishments when a local sports team loses, changes its leniency based on time of day and temperature outside, is kinder to people when they get sentenced on their birthday, and also has a lot of random noise thrown in so that different computers will vary in their judgments over several orders of magnitude." A small speech bubble adds: "PLUS RACISM." A caption below the panel reads: "If humans are algorithms, they should be banned from use in courtrooms." The joke: the listed "software bugs" are actually well-documented biases of human judges. Votey (aftercomic): a roughly sketched grinning face says, "It can also acquire brand new forms of bigotry by using the internet as training data!"