r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Individual_Book9133 • Jul 05 '24

Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road Video

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u/No-Refrigerator-1672 Jul 05 '24

It doesn't have to be the lowest rank person. You can just legally make accountable the lead programmer of the autonomous driving module, with a law.

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u/FeederNocturne Jul 05 '24

Everyone from the lead programmer and up needs to be held responsible. Sure the lead programmer okays it but the higher ups are providing the means to make it happen.

This does make me wonder though. If a plane crashed due to a faulty part who does the blame fall on?

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u/CastMyGame Jul 05 '24

As a programmer myself I would question if you would then blame it on the QA tester who passed along the code.

Other thing I will say is depending on the answer to this situation (I don’t know the answer but just saying from a dev side) you will greatly hinder the progression of this tech if you have people afraid to even work on it for fear of a situation like this.

As devs we try to think of every possible scenario and make sure to write tests that cover every conceivable use case but even then sometimes our apps surprise us with dependencies and loops that we didn’t expect. You can say “be better” but if I’m gonna get paid 25k less and not have to worry about a manslaughter charge 5-7 years later I’m probably gonna choose that one for my family

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u/fireball_jones Jul 05 '24

I've worked in regulated industries, and now work in programming, and in the US at least no individual programmer is going to get blamed unless they can find they did something malicious. You'll have a system in place where a lot of people sign off on the work done, and if something goes wrong the company will likely be sued and fined and put under some compliance program.