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Another quirk of people, particularly acting via "People in Positions of Authority" is that they will need to do something to prevent next time. Why did this h

Another quirk of people, particularly acting via "People in Positions of Authority" is that they will need to do something to prevent next time. Why did this happen? What steps have we make sure it will never happen again? These are both methods of analysing & fixing problems and methods of preserving a decision making authority. Sometimes this degrades into a cynical "something must be done" for the sake of doing, but... it's not all (or even mostly) cynical. It just feels wrong going forward without correction, and we won't tolerate this from our decision makers. EVen if we will, they will assume (out of habit) that we won't We can't know how this happened. There is nothing to do. ..and.. this will happen again, but at a rate lower than human driver's more less opaque accidents.... I'm not sure how that works as an alternative finding out what went wrong and doing something. Your comment is easily translated into "you knew there was a glitch in the software, but you let this happen anyway." Something will need to be done.

jakobegger 9y ago
It‘s amazing how quickly things can happen after an accident. In a nearby town, people have petitioned for a speed limit for a long time. Nothing happened until a 6 year old boy was killed. Within a few weeks a speed limit was in place.
- supertrope 9y ago
  Safety rules are written in blood. Often someone has to die before action is taken. But eventually people forget, get sloppy, or consider the rules completely useless. See: nightclub fires.
grumdan 9y ago
Even if we assume that we wanted to address this for real, I fear that it will be next to impossible to actually assess whether whatever mistake caused this has actually been addressed when all the technology behind it is proprietary. I can easily see people being swayed by a well-written PR speech about how "human safety" is their "top priority" without anything substantial actually being done behind the scenes. I think any attempts to address such issues have to come with far-ranging transparency regulations on companies, possibly including open-sourcing (most of) their code. I don't think regulatory agencies alone would have the right incentives to actually check up on this properly.

jakobegger 9y ago

It‘s amazing how quickly things can happen after an accident. In a nearby town, people have petitioned for a speed limit for a long time. Nothing happened until a 6 year old boy was killed. Within a few weeks a speed limit was in place.

supertrope 9y ago
Safety rules are written in blood. Often someone has to die before action is taken. But eventually people forget, get sloppy, or consider the rules completely useless. See: nightclub fires.

grumdan 9y ago

Even if we assume that we wanted to address this for real, I fear that it will be next to impossible to actually assess whether whatever mistake caused this has actually been addressed when all the technology behind it is proprietary. I can easily see people being swayed by a well-written PR speech about how "human safety" is their "top priority" without anything substantial actually being done behind the scenes. I think any attempts to address such issues have to come with far-ranging transparency regulations on companies, possibly including open-sourcing (most of) their code. I don't think regulatory agencies alone would have the right incentives to actually check up on this properly.