Loopy AI versus the Human

 At a conference recently, I heard someone propose the use of AI in a way that seemed to me to be exactly wrong.

At passport control in some countries, you have to present yourself for a photo, and right and left hand fingerprints (sometimes, thumb too). The complaint/motive was that the system asks you for these things in a certain order, and communication between immigration officers and visitors may be tricky due to language, culture, jet lag, etc etc - so the idea was to replace the communication from the immigration officer, to the visitors, with an AI that could figure out what you are doing wrong and tell you to do the right thing.

However, the idea that humans should fit in with the AI is, to me, abhorrent. What could be done better?

Well, obviously, the order in which you present these factors/attributes is irrelevant - the camera, left and right hands can be done anyhow, and the AI can detect what hand is offered (from finger lengths or from camera image) trivially - this is then simpler for the human. That's what machines are for: to simplify life from unnecessary, pointless, and trivial burdens. One could go a lot further of course. The visitor has presented a passport - perhaps that has fingerprints on it already and those could be used. If the photo matches the person in front of the camera, there's no need to take another picture, just read the e-passport (via NFC etc), and take a copy of the image there (or scan the one on the printed passport page...).

If one wants to go further, one can query the passenger manifest for international flights (it's part of anti-terrorism anyhow) and see what seat people had and who they sat near, and also measure the amount of sweat on the passport and see if the passenger/visitor is nervous etc etc and be completely creepy.

The main point here is that AI is not an excuse to automate a stupid process. It is an opportunity to re-think the process to make it more human friendly.