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Top-level
Software doesn't do harm. In a sane world with the same defective program, those post office people would have been flagged as suspects by the software, and then cleared by the resulting inquiry, 4 comments
@lienrag @gregeganSF I would be terrified to work on a software where a bug could land me in prison. But I *should* be terrified! This is a system where a bug has landed 230 people in prison. If the system carries such a high risk for its users, it has to carry a real risk for the creators too. If I worked on a system where a bug could land me in prison, I would be extremely careful and implement a crazy amount of safeguards. Which sounds like what we want of such a system, right? Again, the bug landed nobody in prison. This distinction is fundamental, and not making this distinction forbids to address the real problem. I'm not asking for the creators to get out of it scot-free, but to keep branding in the public conscience the fundamental principle that "a computer cannot make a management decision". If the creators had shoddy practices, it should be denounced, but it has nothing to do with sending people to jail. If a software bug makes an automated machine gun kill random people, the ones going to jail should be the ones who deployed automated machine guns, not the developers. |
Gregory's Server
@lienrag @gregeganSF I'm a software engineer myself, so I'm generally quick to blame management and processes instead of engineers. But we can't push all responsibility to non-engineers. Ultimately they can only ask the engineer, "is there a bug?" The engineer checks and says "I don't think so."
Here 3,000+ people were severely harmed due to software issues. It would feel just to see proportional punishment visited on the creators of the software.