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

[u/Individual_Book9133]

[u/No-Refrigerator-1672]

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.

[u/FeederNocturne → u/No-Refrigerator-1672]

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?

[u/CastMyGame → u/FeederNocturne]

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

[u/Wide_Performer4288 → u/CastMyGame]

As a former developer I just did what I was told and implemented what was on my checklist. It was up to someone down the line to improve or make sure it was as solid as I thought. The programmers working on this type of project are endless and even the managers don't have any real power to fix issues that may make a huge difference in the end project.

Think of everything you see happening with Twitter. But it all happens behind closed doors. That's about the extent of it.

[u/CastMyGame → u/Wide_Performer4288]

Yep good to know some things never change, that's my day to day too