If a hacker had done this, we would be trying to put them in prison forever. If this were a company making a physical device that happened to kill people, the settlement numbers would be astronomical.
I predict that *at best,* there will be some kind of "hearing" along the lines of the Boeing inquisition, but I doubt even that will happen.
Which makes me wonder (among other things) why we have allowed software bugs and errors to occupy their own special moral category.
@sramsay If the software company were held liable, they would figure out how to make one person liable instead, and everyone would sleep better knowing that person in jail. (/s)
@sramsay Indeed. Same stuff going on with AI misinformation. Criminal negligence is criminal negligence, but we've got this "oh computers are complex" defense baked in
@sramsay Stafford Beer talks about this in his book “Designing Freedom.”
Computer errors are often used as a cover for managerial incompetence (in the book he includes examples of people blaming booking mistakes on computers to make customers less angry /before computers had even been adapted to those industries/)
@parsley True, its hard to imagine no one suing them for damages. Though I wonder if the grounds for such a suit will be conceived the way a criminal charge against a hacker would be — or even suits against opioid manufacturers. I suspect it will be treated as a tort.
If only it were true that companies killing people had to pay astronomical settlements. Look at the recent Boeing settlements with the government over killing over three hundred people with the 737 MAX crashes, which were due to known problems concealed from pilots and government alike.
($243 million may seem a lot but it's a piddly fraction of their profits.)
