My Mother’s Perfect AI Lied And Left Me For Dead Chapter 35
The public hearing at the state legislature was held two months later.
The device company sent a new group of representatives.
They no longer claimed the system could never make mistakes. Instead, they had revised the slogan to *for reference only*. But in the internal operating manual submitted to schools, teachers were still instructed to use risk scores to decide whether students should be allowed to leave class for medical attention.
That manual was not a secret.
The school board already had the original.
At the hearing, I projected that page onto the screen.
“If this is only a reference, why can low-risk students be denied permission to go to the nurse’s office?”
A company representative said, “Schools have to manage large numbers of students. It’s not possible to initiate emergency procedures for every complaint of discomfort.”
“Morgan didn’t ask for emergency procedures. She said her heart hurt.”
“Again with Morgan.” A man sounded impatient. “We can’t let one historical case block all technological progress.”
I turned to look at the speaker.
“She was ten years old. To you, she’s a data point. To herself, that was her only life.”
The committee demanded that the company explain its error rate.
They submitted a summary of accuracy figures but refused to disclose how child samples had been collected. Nor could they explain how stress responses from illness, fear, and lying were distinguished from one another.
The more numbers they produced, the fewer real answers they had.
Westley then presented the same set of simulated baseline values from Ava’s records.
For ten years, those numbers had never changed.