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You seem to be suggesting that a sufficiently complex system dissipates responsibility, transforms an act of engineering into an Act Of God. If that's not your
by rout39574 7y ago
You seem to be suggesting that a sufficiently complex system dissipates responsibility, transforms an act of engineering into an Act Of God.
If that's not your intent, I suggest you rephrase.
When a bridge (another system which is complex but tractable in principle) fails, we work hard to find the feature of the design that led to the failure, and if we decide it was negligence, we exact consequences.
From current news: Should Boeing get a pass on their MCAS failures because "Gosh, it's really hard" ? The MCAS is a robot.
- landryraccoon 7y agoResponsibility itself is a heuristic with a goal. As autonomous systems take on more and more responsibility, tracing back a historical cause will be less and less relevant than actually fixing the fault in the system. Take Boeing for example. Assigning blame to individuals, while rewarding, may not be as effective as changing the system that allows Boeing to continue to act the way it does. Boeing scapegoats, fires some people (which may include the CEO) but the organization, and the nation and legal system that sustains it continues largely unchanged. You’re trying to patch by punishing humans individually, while ignoring faults in the system we have collectively created. Our instinct is to assign blame because historically and evolutionarily harm is usually done by individual humans, and punishing humans is a good heuristic. But it does not seem to me that punishment does a good job of creating good large scale organizations or systems.