NPR has the article Worker Who Sent Hawaii False Alert Thought Missile Attack Was Imminent.
The midnight shift supervisor played a recording over the phone that includes the correct drill language “EXERCISE, EXERCISE, EXERCISE” — but also erroneously contained the text of an Emergency Alert System message for a live ballistic missile alert, including the language “THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” The recording ended by saying “EXERCISE, EXERCISE, EXERCISE.”
This could have been an episode of the old Art Linkletter show “People Do the Funniest Things”. (I know that wasn’t the real name of that show, look it up.)
Imagine what would happen if the system got completely automated, and a robot had to decide what to do with the conflicts in the recorded message. Do you think the people programming the robot would have thought about this possibility?
The show’s best-remembered segment was “Kids Say the Darndest Things”, in which Linkletter interviewed schoolchildren between the ages of five and ten. During the segment’s 27-year run, Linkletter interviewed an estimated 23,000 children.[3] The popularity of the segment led to a TV series with the same title hosted by Bill Cosby on CBS-TV from January 1998 to June 2000.
Just think about the midnight shift supervisor who wanted to do a training exercise. The proper response to an exercise was to not send a message to the public. So did the supervisor expect that the workers were supposed to do nothing in response to the exercise? Would the workers pass the tests by ignoring the exercise? Would the workers have failed the test by sending a false message to the public? What was the supervisor prepared to do in case the workers failed the test?