This wasn't vandalism. It wasn't hacking in the traditional sense (no firewalls were breached, no passwords stolen). It was : the deliberate manipulation, poisoning, or exploitation of automated decision-making systems to produce a harmful, absurd, or destructive outcome.
At first, leadership blamed a glitch. But after a forensic audit, the truth emerged: a disgruntled data scientist had poisoned the training set. He had inserted a few thousand "ghost trips" into the historical data. The algorithm didn't know it was being lied to. It simply learned that circling a block was an efficient way to kill time before a phantom pickup. “algorithmic sabotage”
A system that cannot be questioned—a system that treats every input as truth—invites sabotage. By removing human discretion, we force humans to communicate with the system only through actions. And when the only language left is action, the action becomes violent (or deceptive). This wasn't vandalism