[_cairn]

Some good points you bring up.

This is not a response to your entire post, just a small one to "where we don't want a rigid machine-like process" - I think this is something that machines are perfectly capable of solving. We are not arguing about whether or not, in the ticket printer case, the machine should or should not print a ticket outside it's rigid specified rules (late by 1 minute etc). In fact I think that most of us would agree that as a matter of principle such grace-periods are a fundamental lubricant of a comfortable society. We just have (historically) had to plead our cases and rely on the grace of other humans to grant such meager exceptions to rigid rules. We are just arguing at this point about what the numbers for such grace periods should be, machines can easily implement them once we find a happy medium. My $0.02 anyway.

[hvidgaard]

If we implement a 60 minutes deadline and a 10 minutes grace period, we might as well just set the deadline to 50 minutes and be done with it.

I'm an advocate for a hybrid approach. Get machines to do the bulk of all the work, and have a human handle problems, edgecases, and "bending the rules for loyalty".

[jameshart]

Arbitrary deadlines like this are heuristics that we give to systems or people who don't have realtime access to the full picture so they can make decisions that are probably, on average, more likely right than wrong. The human checkin clerk can, at their discretion, call the gate and see if boarding is delayed, or find out how the security lines look, gathering additional information to make a decision, but the one hour deadline is a rule of thumb that they can use to make an initial call. But even with the additional discretion they have, they are still guessing whether the rules are worth bending for this passenger, what the real value to the airline is of getting that customer on this flight or bumping them to a later one.

A computer replacement that doesn't have any additional data, and isn't programmed with the discretion to make those calls to find out additional information, is going to just make the call that checkin is closed. It is probably an inferior solution to the human.

A computer replacement that has information about current security wait times, gate status, as well as information about all other flights, the location of the inbound plane, the estimated lifetime value of the customer standing in front of the kiosk, what competing airlines are doing, and the exact current company financials, can put all that data together to make far better decisions than the human checkin clerk could, in the best interests of the airline, and it doesn't need to be given arbitrary rules like 'turn people away if they show up 59 minutes before scheduled departure'.

[jeandejean]

I totally agree: generalizing something always has a cost. Not every experience with a machine is smooth, not every experience with a human is smooth. Therefore we need both! And so far only humans are able to improvise, understand, use emphaty... But machines are fast, scale easily, never stop working (haha)... Both is the wise choice!