The British government demonstrated rare imagination and initiative when it held an international summit in November to discuss the existential risks posed by artificial intelligence. Tragically, successive British governments have shown a shameful failure to protect their citizens from more basic misfiring technology.
Take the case of Seema Misra, pregnant and manager of a sub-Post Office, who was in 2010 wrongfully jailed for 15 months on her son’s tenth birthday for theft and false accounting, flagged by Fujitsu’s flawed Horizon computer system. It took 11 years for her conviction, as well as those of 38 colleagues, to be quashed by the Court of Appeal. The judgment found that the Post Office’s “failures of investigation and disclosure were so egregious” as to make the prosecution of these sub-postmasters “an affront to the conscience of the court”.
Last week’s heart-rending ITV television drama shone a light on the one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history. It has rightly triggered public fury and forced the government into fresh action. To date, only 93 of the more than 700 people convicted in the affair have seen their convictions overturned.