Financial ruin for the company that was willing to put that BS below it's letterhead? Yeah, sure, in proportion with the harm caused. That said, human life isn't sacred. It and everything else gets trades for dollars all the time. A death or three shouldn't cripple a big company like Tesla unless they were playing so fast and loose that there's significant punitive damages.
In a large company like Tesla it shouldn't be marketing's job to restrain itself. That's not safe at that scale. There should be someone or a group who's job it is to prevent marketing from getting ahead of reality just like it's security's job to spend all day playing whack-a-mole with the stupid ideas devs (especially the web ones) dream up. Efficiently mediating conflicting interests like that is what the corporate control structure is for.
People using your product in accordance with your marketing should be considered almost the same as in accordance with your documentation. While "people dying while using the product in accordance with TFM" is not treated as strict liability it's pushing awfully close.
I see it as a simple case of the company owning up to its actions. It failed to manage itself properly, marketing got ahead of reality. You screw up and someone gets hurt then you pay up.
Are you saying that you see human life as something that can be bought and sold?
It's one thing to talk about punitive damages and liability, these are factual mechanisms of our legal system. But just because damages can be paid and are on a regular basis they do not imply that there is some socially acceptable let alone codified price for a human life. And we should hope for our own sake there never is.
I agree that marketing should not be allowed to let their imagination run wild to the detriment of the company.
In the case of the liability bit IANAL but that's likely to differ between industries. Some sectors like aviation are highly regulated and require certification of the aircraft and the airplane flight manual is tied to that serial number and is expected to be, correct and free of gross errors for normal operation. So liability can vary. Are you suggesting from experience that there is no liability in the case of Tesla taking into account their industry's context? I don't know enough about their industry to judge, just looking for clarification.
OP is probably referring to the fact that in wrongful death suits, society has put a very tangible financial number on the value of human life. This made it possible for corporations to make trade-off between profit and liability, giving the potential that someone could get enough profit to justify risking others’ lives.
Punitive damages go part way to help prevent this, but not far enough to guarantee that it never happens.
Had the society truly believed life to be sacred, I suspect we’d have very different business practices and penalties that are not limited to financial ruin.
Well, unfortunately we also believe that corporations are sacred, so when bad things happen we shake our fists and collect a couple dollars. But the guilty corporation is never put to death. (Well, rarely ever..)
It's not that cut and clear. Yeah killing and maiming is bad but those things always (and will for the foreseeable future) happen at large scale and you have to be able to have a reasonable discussion about the trade-offs. "Well we can't guarantee we won't kill anyone in an edge case so let's all just go home" isn't an option.
You can build a highway overpass with a center support on the median for X and there will by a small chance of someone crashing into it and getting killed. You could design one without a support on the median but it will cost Y (Y is substantially more than X). Now scale that decision to all overpasses and you've got a substantial body count. At the end of the day it's a trade-off between lives/injury and dollars.
Agreed that their are trade-offs made, of course. But this society spends a ton of time trying to prevent all kinds of death. That's because life is sacred.
It seems odd to argue that. Yeah of course we can't stop doing things, but it doesn't mean we don't try really hard to avoid killing people.
Yes, and both Elon Musk as an individual and Tesla Motors as an organization agree. How they approach that idea is somewhat different from what we're used to though.
Their basic assertions are (in my words):
1. Vision and radar based technology, along with current generation GPUs and related hardware, along with sufficiently developed software, will be able to make cars 10x safer.
2. How quickly total deaths are reduced is tied directly to how quickly and widely such technology is rolled out and used.
3. Running in 'shadow' mode is a good source of data collection to inform improvements in the software.
4. Having the software/hardware actually control cars is an even better source of data collection to accelerate development.
5. There is additional, incremental risk created when the software/hardware is used in an early state.
6. This is key: the total risk over time is lessened with fast, aggressive rollouts of incomplete software and hardware, because it will allow a larger group of people to have access to more robust, safer software sooner than otherwise would be possible.
That last point is the balance: is the small additional risk Tesla is subjecting early participants to outweighed by how much more quickly the collected data will allow Tesla to produce a more complete safety solution?
We don't know for sure yet, but I think the odds are pretty good that pushing hard now will produce more total safety over time.
> life is sacred
This is my background as well, and its an opinion I personally hold.
At the same time, larger decisions, made by society, by individuals, and by companies, must put some sort of value on life. And different values on different lives. Talking about how much a life is worth is a taboo topic, but it's something that is considered, consciously or otherwise, all day, every day, by many people, myself included.
Most every big company, Tesla Motors included,make decisions based on these calculations all the time. Being a 'different kind of company' in many ways, Tesla makes these calculations somewhat differently.
That's a pretty cynical calculation to make. And no, we don't typically accept untested additional risk in the name of saving untold later. We test first. There's a reason why drugs are tested on animals first, then trials, then broad availability, but still with scrutiny and standards. This is a well trod philosophical argument, but we seem to have accepted that we don't kill a few to save others. We don't fly with untested jet engines. We don't even sell cars without crashing a few to test them. The other companies involved in self driving technology have been in testing mode. They have not skipped a step and headed straight for broad availability.
Why then does Tesla have a pass? There's no evidence it's actually safer. And there's no evidence that the company is truthful. We don't accept when a pharmaceutical company says, "no, it's good. Trust us." That would be crazy. We should not accept Tesla's assurances with blind faith simply because they have better marketing and a questionable ethical standard.
Financial ruin for the company that was willing to put that BS below it's letterhead? Yeah, sure, in proportion with the harm caused. That said, human life isn't sacred. It and everything else gets trades for dollars all the time. A death or three shouldn't cripple a big company like Tesla unless they were playing so fast and loose that there's significant punitive damages.
In a large company like Tesla it shouldn't be marketing's job to restrain itself. That's not safe at that scale. There should be someone or a group who's job it is to prevent marketing from getting ahead of reality just like it's security's job to spend all day playing whack-a-mole with the stupid ideas devs (especially the web ones) dream up. Efficiently mediating conflicting interests like that is what the corporate control structure is for.
People using your product in accordance with your marketing should be considered almost the same as in accordance with your documentation. While "people dying while using the product in accordance with TFM" is not treated as strict liability it's pushing awfully close.
I see it as a simple case of the company owning up to its actions. It failed to manage itself properly, marketing got ahead of reality. You screw up and someone gets hurt then you pay up.