This is exactly the sort of justification that I am cautioning against. Would it be great if they did take the problem seriously and solve it? Of course. But it

This is exactly the sort of justification that I am cautioning against. Would it be great if they did take the problem seriously and solve it? Of course. But it is not our duty to justify their decisions when the consequences of their decisions may cause grievous harm to thousands. It is their job, the company's, to justify to the satisfaction of engineers and the people that we should trust the lives of thousands to millions on their systems. If anything, it is our job to be skeptical of their claims and grill them ruthlessly before they should even be allowed to consider deploying such systems. I mean, think of any other software system, would you trust anybody's lives to any of them? Would the engineers on those projects agree? Most software engineers I know would be horrified if their systems were used in something responsible for even a single life let alone thousands. The claim that we should trust these companies with hundreds of thousands of lives is an extraordinary claim that they should be required to provide extraordinary evidence for. And, even if we are convinced, they should still be ultimately liable for their choice of decision to make sure they are actually putting their money where their mouth is. It is what we demand from bridge builders, it is what we demand from nuclear reactor designs, it should be what we demand from mass-produced internet-connected safety-critical devices.