Responsibility 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 l

Responsibility 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.