> You can arrest a driver for not making space for an emergency vehicle. Who do we arrest here?
That's the best part, no one! We have finally managed to invent a system that widely disperses accountability so much no one can be held liable when something goes wrong.
>no one can be held liable when something goes wrong.
No, at the very least tort laws still apply even if the driver is a corporation. Do you really need someone sitting in jail to satisfy your justice boner?
Yes, I want to see real, serious punishment for corporate crimes, on par with the life disruption experienced by people who see a jail sentence. It's almost always brutal - major income disruption, job loss, etc. If it's a small fine, which it always seems to be for corporations, then there is no incentive for following the law. I'm also in favor of corporate death sentences for large-scale egregious violations - liquidate assets and jail executives.
By corporatizing social harms, basically nobody is ever held accountable - except for the little guy.
>By corporatizing social harms, basically nobody is ever held accountable - except for the little guy.
Again, this is false. At the very least there's financial penalties, which the shareholders are on the hook for. Moreover the corporate malfeasance that does happen don't map nicely to human crimes. If you kill a guy, you get sent to jail for decades. But what if you're a company, that makes a machine with sloppy code[1] that unintentionally kills someone? What do you do? Jail the programmer who wrote the code? Jail the manager who did the code review? Jail the CEO who had no knowledge of it but "buck stops with him" and we hate CEOs? How does the death penalty work? If you think it through it's basically a fine equivalent to the company's market cap. If Boeing does a bad that kills one person, does that mean the US government just repossesses the entire company?
I think of the corporate death penalty as being more appropriate when leadership knew exactly what was going on and chose profits over people. Exxon, see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063. Purdue Pharma, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma. Company gets sold for parts and Cauitebgoes to prison probably for life due to the amount of lives they potentially destroyed. Pretty much all the tobacco companies knew how harmful their product and made a concerted effort to fund their own bogus studies to throw up a smoke screen. Facebook makes billions from (for example) scams and fraudulent ads: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu.... Maybe don't throw their CEO in prison but at least fine them 10x the profit they made vs. the usual .0001%.
Depending on how severe the error is, it could be professional negligence. In other professions, including engineering, this can result in a loss of the professional's license and their inability to continue to work in that field. Also, for negligent drivers, a suspension of their driving license can apply. So there is precedent for severe punishment even if nobody gets a jail sentence.
After watching the movie "dark waters" about the whole Teflon scandal, seems like it should be the highest up person (or people) who had knowledge of the incident (obviously must be proven). An individual engineer knowing a car has a dangerous edge case isn't enough to get them in trouble in my view, especially if the company has claimed they are working on fixing it. Also legitimate mistakes are just mistakes, companies won't get it right every single time.
However there's cases where its completely proven that someone high up knew there was a systemic safety issue (they had a broad view and could see all the different areas of what was going on), they knew exactly what was causing it, and they do nothing because they want to keep the profit going. The fact those people don't go to jail just tells me that corporations have way too much leeway.
In Australia it's the board of directors who are liable. They can be liable if they personally direct the company to do something illegal (obviously?) but there is also a positive obligation to exercise due diligence. This covers (but is not limited to) workplace safety and safety of customers and the public. Directors can be personally liable for breaches of this duty and the penalties extend to possible imprisonment and very substantial fines.
>but there is also a positive obligation to exercise due diligence. This covers (but is not limited to) workplace safety and safety of customers and the public.
Is there any indication this requirement was breached for this case? I'm all for jailing executives of companies where they specifically failed to enact safety measures, or even didn't care enough about safety, but in this case it's simply a case of a edge they didn't test. It's not for lack of trying either. Apparently they have their own AI model to generate test data, so they can train/test what happens if a hurricane hits, for instance.
> Do you really need someone sitting in jail to satisfy your justice boner?
Literally, and intentionally avoiding any attempt to examine the implications? No probably not.
But reasonable punishment discourages bad behavior. And software engineers have a habit of ignoring the implications of a defective design. I think apocalyptic fines applied to the companies creating the systems for automated cars would also create the correct incentives, but I find that to be less likely than imprisonment.
What I want is software and systems to not suck ass. I don't want to deal with defective... everything, because it was faster to deliver. That's especially true when it contributes to the death or injury of a person that didn't do anything wrong.
I don't care what works, but people being afraid of going to jail for hurting someone absolutely does work. And 'administrative fines' don't work.
>But reasonable punishment discourages bad behavior. And software engineers have a habit of ignoring the implications of a defective design. I think apocalyptic fines applied to the companies creating the systems for automated cars would also create the correct incentives, but I find that to be less likely than imprisonment.
This just feels like the "we should make the justice system harsher to deter crime" argument but applied to software engineering. If it works, why stop at criminal cases? Maybe we should dock the pay of SWEs next time they cause a prod issue?
> This just feels like the "we should make the justice system harsher to deter crime" argument but applied to software engineering.
Ignore that feeling, it's wrong. Because it's not what I'm arguing for. Reasonable is a load bearing qualifier.
It doesn't feel like the people making the decisions that meaningfully contribute to causing harm to other people, ever have to deal with the fallout or repercussions for their unfortunate choices. Deincentivizing that behavior is my goal. And I'll unfortunately take iterative or suboptimal options at this point. I don't like it, but I do want to try to be realistic.
Corporations are person-like entities, so there’s a plausible argument to be made. The states seem loathe to be precedent-setters in triggering evaluations of this argument, though, so I don’t know of any supporting cases yet. Whoever’s first will see corporate tax revenue fall off a cliff once a corporation can be subjected to community service, so they have a lot of self-interest in not prosecuting these violations.
And have actual meaningful consequences happen? I'am.
Twitter is creating CSAM, Meta & OpenAI pirate millions of books and Nvidia is playing some sort of shell game to pump their stock price.
If a regular person committed any of those offenses once they would be lucky to just to be sued but because of "AI" nothing happens to these companies.
It's unclear whether generated CSAM is illegal, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn.... Moreover x/x.ai wasn't intentionally generating the images. Yes, someone intentionally set up grok to generate images, but nobody at x/x.ai was like "yes, let's generate some CSAM". That adds an additional layer of obfuscation that makes it harder to compare to a "regular person".
>Meta & OpenAI pirate millions of books
Give me a break. People on /r/datahoarders pirate millions of books all the time. Use a VPN and basically nobody bothers going after you. If anything Meta/OpenAI are getting harsher treatment than the average person because they're juicier defendants.
>Nvidia is playing some sort of shell game to pump their stock price
Yes. Jail sentences are for a selection of some misdemeanors and not others. The person does or cooperates with X amount of harm, they ought to share similar penalties.
I would like crimes to have consequences that actually deter the culprits from committing them. A pittance fine for a company is not what I want to see. Let's have a small percentage of net worth fine on the owners instead.
For publicly traded companies the owners/shareholders are your grandparents, teachers, all sorts of regular people. You want to take a percentage of their already small net worth?
This position that no wrongdoing or illegal action can be discouraged because someone has to eat, or because it's "regular people" who have accountability because of who they decided to have manage their investments is getting old. Accountability has been diluted so much that no one is accountable. What about the people who are harmed, the victims, your grandparents, teachers, all sorts of regular people. Nothing is going to get better if we're constantly looking for the most appropriate person to place blame on. Maybe people should be paying more attention to the things they invest in/own.
Most people have no idea what they're invested in. Most are invested in mutual funds through their work or 401k. My point isn't that we shouldn't hold people accountable. My point is that going after owners/shareholders is not the solution we want because it hurts people who have nothing to do with what happened. We need to go after executives.
I'm sure it's a productive use of the already overburdened justice system's time to round up half the country, so they can sit in "jail" for a few minutes.
No shit. Maybe we let everyone with only a few seconds to serve just walk free without pursing a case on them at all. The people owning 90% of all stocks can serve 90% of all the sentencing and that'd be fine enough for society.
We can also make the bus smaller. And to give the passengers more agency, we can let them drive it. Instead of paying bus fare every time they board, they can pay a larger up-front cost for this bus, and of course, ongoing gas & maintenance. To make sure they don't pose a danger to others, they can also purchase insurance, and of course have some sort of license to operate it.
Not to mention we need places to park these buses. We should require every commercial location to have multi-level parking decks so that there is ample parking.
That's ludicrous. Think of the property values that would be decreased by thusly besmirching the precious skyline! Instead, we should mandate that people build out, wider & longer, rather than taller. Commercial locations should have parking lots for these microbuses (should really come up with a better name for them, too.)
Where I live, the bus line that serves me only has maybe one marked stop. There's a bus depot at the ferry; every where else, you can just stand on the side of the road and wave your hand when the bus comes by and it'll stop for you; when you want to get off on your way home from the ferry, you push the button and let the driver know where to stop.
But that only works because density is low and there's only one plausible destination.
Most optimization is a curve. Arguing for moving closer to the top of the curve is not the same as arguing for moving all the way to the minima on the other side. But why do I have to say that?
> Can someone in GitHub senior leadership please start paying attention and reprioritise towards actually delivering a product that's at least relatively reliable?
They claim that is what they are doing right now. [1]
Zero indication that migrating to azure will improve stability over the colos they are in now. The outages aren’t caused by the datacenter, whatever MS execs say.
Under the same circumstances (kid suddenly emerging between two parked cars and running out onto the street), it could be debated that the outcome could have been worse if a human were driving.
I don't know about the remote driver conspiracy, but waymo slowing down and that kid surviving a crash after jumping on the road from behind a tall vehicle was the best PR waymo could have asked for.
That's the best part, no one! We have finally managed to invent a system that widely disperses accountability so much no one can be held liable when something goes wrong.
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