Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World

by Tim Harford

their error only when he threatened them with the inconvenience of a court case. We are reminded of an old joke: ‘To err is human, but to really foul things up takes a computer.’ On the very same day that Victor Hankins’s car was snapped, Google unveiled a neural network that could identify house numbers in photographs taken by the Google Street View cars. Give the network an hour, announced Google’s research team, and it could read every house number in France with 96 per cent accuracy. That sounds impressive – but even a low error rate produces a vast number of mistakes. There are twenty-five million homes in France, so another way to describe Google’s new neural network is that it can misidentify a million street numbers an hour.

Computers fuck up