Page 135 of The Proving Ground
“Mr. Whittaker, did this post come from you?” I asked.
“Looks like it,” Whittaker said.
“I draw your attention to the acronym GIGO. What did you mean by that?”
“That stands forgarbage in, garbage out.”
“And what does that mean to you when it comes to programming artificial intelligence?”
“Exactly what it says. If you put in garbage, that’s what you’ll get back.”
“So by ‘garbage,’ you are talking about bad programming, programming contradictory or possibly damaging to the purpose of the app?”
“Correct.”
“This would include the biases of the programmers too, would it not?”
“Uh, if there were biases, yeah.”
“Everybody has biases, don’t they?”
It was a perfect question because it was a lose-lose for Whittaker. No matter how he answered, he’d be setting up my next line of questioning. Of course Mitchell Mason recognized this and objected before Whittaker could attempt an answer.
“The question is too broad,” he said. “Counsel is just trying to bait the witness into an answer he can twist into an admission of some sort.”
“And defense counsel is trying to communicate directly with the witness with his objection,” I said. Then, looking at Mason, I added, “Good job, Mitch. Message delivered.”
“I’ll sustain the objection to the question being too broad,” Ruhlin said. “And please direct all arguments to the court and not each other.”
I retooled the question to make it slim enough to get past an objection.
“Do you have biases, Mr. Whittaker?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” he answered.
“Really? No biases at all?”
“If I do, I keep them out of my code.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“What other social media sites do you post on?”
“Not that many.”
“How about Four-chan and Eight-kun? How often do you frequent those sites?”
“I don’t even know what they are.”
“Really, now? What about a site called Dirty-four? Did you ever go on that?”
“Nope.”
“Why is it wiseacre twenty-three? Is twenty-three your birthday or an anniversary?”
“It’s just a random number.”
