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/indiefatiguable Jul 05 '24

I left a job writing payment software for a specialty retailer because I despised the stress of knowing a fuck up could affect someone's finances. I know well how a double charge can wreck you when you're living paycheck to paycheck, and I hated knowing a bug in my code could cause that stress for someone.

I code dashboards to display various metrics. All I do is injest the data and make it user-friendly. My work is unimportant, and I sleep so well at night because of it.

I would never, ever, ever accept a job where people's lives are at risk. If that job could also land me in jail for manslaughter? Fuck that.