Here's the far more interesting question about this situation: What if nobody at Volkswagen really even knew this was happening? In other words: systems are com

Here's the far more interesting question about this situation: What if nobody at Volkswagen really even knew this was happening? In other words: systems are complex, and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that this cheating* could have arisen purely as an emergent property of a set of otherwise innocuous changes, and then stuck around through something like environmental fitness, as it was functionally useful for the organization as a whole. If the Volkswagen case seems too clear cut for that, then think about PageRank, or Facebook's software that decides what to show to whom. Are we all so sure that every engineer who works with this code really knows, ex ante, all of the effects their changes might have down the line? There are a lot of demands for criminal liability in this thread, but I'd suggest we proceed carefully. While it certainly looks suspicious, there are a lot of ways that weird behavior can creep into software that don't involve malicious intent. Look at it this way: could Volkswagen engineers conceivably have written code that caused the system to fail all emissions tests all the time? (Yes.) Could they have done so without realizing that they'd made an error? (Sure.) Would we all assume that that bad code was deliberately introduced? I'm not so sure. edit: See also a related discussion in the thread about the OPM data leak: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10303950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10303950 === * Or maybe some other, hypothetical cheating. Sure, in this particular case, maybe a particular software engineer or set of engineers knew exactly what they were doing when they wrote the code that enabled the cheating. But the thing I'm interested in is what happens when that's not the case, and how close that day is.