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While I agree - I reckon it's far past time that we pierce the outdated "corporate personhood" idea, and let Tesla/Uber/Apple/Waymo et al. know that society has

While I agree - I reckon it's far past time that we pierce the outdated "corporate personhood" idea, and let Tesla/Uber/Apple/Waymo et al. know that society has chosen to hold their "corporate personhood" responsible in the same way people are held responsible. If your corporation (via it's self driving software) kills someone, the corporation will "go to jail", a C level exec does the jailtime and the entire company will be unable to carry on any of it's normal business for the duration of the sentence (while still being held responsible for it's obligations to staff/suppliers/cerditors). If that self driving software is judged to be liable for a traffic infringement, the corporation will pay an amount equal to the percentage of income that a human driver would have paid. If it's an infringement with a ~$400 fine, the corporation should pay ~0.5% of their annual income - the same sort of penalty as "an average salary" person. A couple of $20mil fines and a 6 month total company shutdown would be very "proactive" in encouraging Tesla to get Elon to shut the fuck up with his big bold claims that cannot be backed up. If Uber had been slapped with the "corporate personhood" equivalent of whatever penalty a human driver who'd killed that person crossing the road with a bicycle they'd be far more circumspect about using minimum wage contractors as "safety drivers" in their prototypes. (I can dream, right?)

YawningAngel 6y ago
At a certain scale, it's inevitable that even a responsible company will screw something up. Shutting the company down when that happens is tantamount to banning companies above a certain size
- bigiain 6y ago
  Taken to the extreme, what you're suggesting amounts to "large corporations should be allowed to kill people occasionally". I can see a wide spectrum between my (admittedly over punitive towards corporations) ideas and this (somewhat intentional misinterpreted) idea of yours. But I do honestly think Uber and Tesla have evaded morally deserved punishments by blaming customers or contract staff who were pretty much doing what everybody would expect to be able to do using the technology as described. "it's inevitable that even a responsible _person_ will screw something up" - but that doesn't mean we give them a zero consequence break if they kill or injure someone. (We do, however, distinguish between things like murder, manslaughter, and negligence-causing-death. And penalise differently, based at least partly on the ability of the punishment to discourage other people from doing similar things. Perhaps Uber was only guilty of negligence-causing-death for using minimum wage contractors as safety drivers. Perhaps Tesla was guilty of manslaughter by advertising as "autopilot" a thing that drives full speed into offramp dividers?)
  - bumby 6y ago
    We have already accepted this in other areas where low probability meets large applicability. We know probability is non-zero and given a large enough sample size there is an expected adverse outcome quite a bit higher than zero. E.g., a more trivial example is that the allowable number of insect parts in food is greater than zero because it’s impossible to mass produce food and never have contamination.
- rtx 6y ago
  We shut down Boeing. As per your argument their planes should still be flying.
  - bumby 6y ago
    Would the corollary be that autonomous cars should have a certification for self-driving, similar to the FAA certification? Possibly an extension of their car safety rating?
    - bigiain 6y ago
      Yes, except for the sort of “FAA Certification” that let Boeing sign off on their own work and the FAA just rubber stamp it... I’d kinda like to see Tesla’s reaction if they were told that any “autopilot” crashes could result in the entire fleet of that model car being taken off the road, with Tesla responsible to all the owners for the disruption while a thorough investigation takes place, possibly a year or more.
      - bumby 6y ago
        Without any real insight, my hunch is the FAA did that because they are probably too strapped/underfunded to do the proper due diligence. It’s tough to know enough about multiple complex airframes enough to ferret our interaction failures so they defer to the teams that supposedly do know enough... which creates an inherent conflict of interest. It will be interesting to see how regulators treat autonomous vehicles. I have a feeling they will defer to the existing recall mechanism rather than completely grounding a fleet

YawningAngel 6y ago

At a certain scale, it's inevitable that even a responsible company will screw something up. Shutting the company down when that happens is tantamount to banning companies above a certain size

bigiain 6y ago
Taken to the extreme, what you're suggesting amounts to "large corporations should be allowed to kill people occasionally". I can see a wide spectrum between my (admittedly over punitive towards corporations) ideas and this (somewhat intentional misinterpreted) idea of yours. But I do honestly think Uber and Tesla have evaded morally deserved punishments by blaming customers or contract staff who were pretty much doing what everybody would expect to be able to do using the technology as described. "it's inevitable that even a responsible _person_ will screw something up" - but that doesn't mean we give them a zero consequence break if they kill or injure someone. (We do, however, distinguish between things like murder, manslaughter, and negligence-causing-death. And penalise differently, based at least partly on the ability of the punishment to discourage other people from doing similar things. Perhaps Uber was only guilty of negligence-causing-death for using minimum wage contractors as safety drivers. Perhaps Tesla was guilty of manslaughter by advertising as "autopilot" a thing that drives full speed into offramp dividers?)
- bumby 6y ago
  We have already accepted this in other areas where low probability meets large applicability. We know probability is non-zero and given a large enough sample size there is an expected adverse outcome quite a bit higher than zero. E.g., a more trivial example is that the allowable number of insect parts in food is greater than zero because it’s impossible to mass produce food and never have contamination.
rtx 6y ago
We shut down Boeing. As per your argument their planes should still be flying.
- bumby 6y ago
  Would the corollary be that autonomous cars should have a certification for self-driving, similar to the FAA certification? Possibly an extension of their car safety rating?
  - bigiain 6y ago
    Yes, except for the sort of “FAA Certification” that let Boeing sign off on their own work and the FAA just rubber stamp it... I’d kinda like to see Tesla’s reaction if they were told that any “autopilot” crashes could result in the entire fleet of that model car being taken off the road, with Tesla responsible to all the owners for the disruption while a thorough investigation takes place, possibly a year or more.
    - bumby 6y ago
      Without any real insight, my hunch is the FAA did that because they are probably too strapped/underfunded to do the proper due diligence. It’s tough to know enough about multiple complex airframes enough to ferret our interaction failures so they defer to the teams that supposedly do know enough... which creates an inherent conflict of interest. It will be interesting to see how regulators treat autonomous vehicles. I have a feeling they will defer to the existing recall mechanism rather than completely grounding a fleet