[miki123211]

This is a really hard and weird ethical problem IMHO, and one we'll have to deal with sooner or later.

Imagine you have a self-driving AI that causes fatal accidents 10 times less often than your average human driver, but when the accidents happen, nobody knows why.

Should we switch to that AI, and have 10 times fewer accidents and no accountability for the accidents that do happen, or should we stay with humans, have 10x more road fatalities, but stay happy because the perpetrators end up in prison?

Framed like that, it seems like the former solution is the only acceptable one, yet people call for CEOs to go to prison when an AI goes wrong. If that were the case, companies wouldn't dare use any AI, and that would basically degenerate to the latter solution.

[moritzwarhier]

I don't know about your country, but people going to prison for causing road fatalities is extremely rare here.

Even temporary loss of the drivers license has a very high bar, and that's the main form of accountability for driver behavior in Germany, apart from fines.

Badly injuring or killing someone who themselves did not violate traffic safety regulations is far from guaranteed to cause severe repercussions for the driver.

By default, any such situation is an accident and at best people lose their license for a couple of months.

[paulryanrogers]

Drivers are the apex predators. My local BMV passed me after I badly failed the vision test. Thankfully I was shaken enough to immediately go to the eye doctor and get treatment.

[chefandy]

Sadly, we live in a society where those executives would use that impunity as carte blanche to spend no money improving (in the best-case scenario,) or even more likely, keep cutting safety expenditures until the body counts get high enough for it to start damaging sales. If we’ve already given them a free pass, they will exploit it to the greatest possible extent to increase profit.

[ETH_start]

What evidence exists for this characterization?

[rgbrgb]

The way health insurance companies optimize for denials in the US.

[ETH_start]

What evidence is there that they do that? That would be a very one-dimensional competitive strategy, given a competing insurance company could wipe them out by simply being more reasonable in handling insurance claims and taking all of their market share.

[Mil0dV]

If there is objective, complete data available to all consumers, who are not influenced by all sorts of other means to choose.

Right now it's a race to the bottom - who can get away with the worst service. So they're motivated to be able to prevent bad press etc.

The whole system is broken. Just take a look at the 41 countries with higher life expectancy.

[ETH_start]

There is no evidence that this what's happening, and the famous RAND health insurance study showed that health outcomes have almost no relationship with the healthcare system, so you'll need to look elsewhere for explanations for the U.S.'s relatively poor standing in life expectancy rankings.

[8note]

talking specifically with car companies, you can look at volkswagon faking their emissions tests, and the rise of the light truck, which reduces road safety for the sake of cost cutting

[ETH_start]

The emissions test faking is an anecdote, not an indication that this is the average behavior of companies or the dominant behavior that determines their overall impact in society.

As for the growing prevalence of the light truck, that is a harmful market dynamic stemming from the interaction of consumer incentives and poor public road use policy. The design of rules governing use of public roads is not within the domain of the market.

[chefandy]

Let’s see… of the top of my head…

- Air Pollution

- Water Pollution

- Disposable Packaging

- Health Insurance

- Steward Hospitals

- Marketing Junk Food, Candy and Sodas directly to children

- Tobacco

- Boeing

- Finance

- Pharmaceutical Opiates

- Oral Phenylepherin to replace pseudoephedrine despite knowing a) it wasn’t effective, and b) posed a risk to people with common medical conditions.

- Social Media engagement maximization

- Data Brokerage

- Mining Safety

- Construction site safety

- Styrofoam Food and Bev Containers

- ITC terminal in Deerfield Park (read about the decades of them spewing thousands of pounds benzene into the air before the whole fucking thing blew up, using their influence to avoid addressing any of it, and how they didn’t have automatic valves, spill detection, fire detection, sprinklers… in 2019.)

- Grocery store and restaurant chains disallowing cashiers from wearing masks during the first pandemic wave, well after we knew the necessity, because it made customers uncomfortable.

- Boar’s Head Liverwurst

And, you know, plenty more. As someone that grew up playing in an unmarked, illegal, not-access-controlled toxic waste dump in a residential area owned by a huge international chemical conglomerate— and just had some cancer taken out of me last year— I’m pretty familiar with various ways corporations are willing to sacrifice health and safety to bump up their profit margin. I guess ignoring that kids were obviously playing in a swamp of toluene, PCBs, waste firefighting chemicals, and all sorts of other things on a plot not even within sight of the factory in the middle of a bunch of small farms was just the cost of doing business. As was my friend who, when he was in vocational high school, was welding a metal ladder above storage tank in a chemical factory across the state. The plant manager assured the school the tanks were empty, triple rinsed and dry, but they exploded, blowing the roof off the factory taking my friend with it. They were apparently full of waste chemicals and IIRC, the manager admitted to knowing that in court. He said he remembers waking up briefly in the factory parking lot where he landed, and then the next thing he remembers was waking up in extreme pain wearing the compression gear he’d have to wear into his mid twenties to keep his grafted skin on. Briefly looking into the topic will show how common this sort of malfeasance is in manufacturing.

The burden of proof is on people saying that they won’t act like the rest of American industry tasked with safety.

[ETH_start]

If you don't have laws against dumping in the commons, yes people will dump. I don't think anyone would dispute that notion. But if the laws account for the external cost of non-market activity like dumping pollution in the commons, then by all indications markets produce rapid increases, improvements in quality of life.

Just look back over the last 200 years, per capita GDP has grown 30 fold, life expectancy has rapidly grown, infant mortality has decreased from 40% to less than 1%. I can go on and on. All of this is really owing to rising productivity and lower poverty, and that in turn is a result of the primarily market-based process of people meeting each other's needs through profit-motivated investment, bargain hunting, and information dispersal through decentralized human networks (which produce firm and product reputations).

As for masks, the scientific gold standard in scientific reviews, the Cochrane Library, did a meta-review on masks and COVID, and the author of the study concluded:

"it's more likely than not that they don't work"

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/health/2023/09/09/smr-author-...

The potential harm of extensive masking is not well-studied.

They may contribute to the increased social isolation and lower frequency of exercise that led to a massive spike in obesity in children during the COVID hysteria era.

And they are harmful to the development of the doctor-patient relationship:

https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3879648/

Which does not portend well for other kinds of human relationships.

[chefandy]

> If you don't have laws against dumping in the commons, yes people will dump.

You can’t possibly say, in good faith, that it think this was legal, can you? Of course it wasn’t. It was totally legal discharging some of the less odious things into the river despite going through a residential neighborhood about 500 feet downstream— the EPA permitted that and while they far exceeded their allotted amounts, that was far less of a crime. Though it was funny to see one kid in my class who lived in that neighborhood right next to the factory ask a scientist they sent to give a presentation in our second grade class why the snow in their back yard was purple near the pond (one thing they made was synthetic clothing dye.) People used to lament runaway dogs returning home rainbow colored. That was totally legal. However, this huge international chemical conglomerate with a huge US presence routinely, secretively, and consistently broke the law dumping carcinogenic, toxic, and ecologically disastrous chemicals there, and three other locations, in the middle of the night. Sometimes when we played there, any of the stuff we left lying around was moved to the edges and there were fresh bulldozer tracks in the morning, and we just thought it was from farm equipment. All of it was in residential neighborhoods without so much as a no trespassing sign posted, let alone a chain link fence, for decades, until the 90s, because they were trimming their bill for the legal and readily available disposal services they primarily used, and of course signs and chainlink fences would have raised questions. They correctly gauged that they could trade our health for their profit: the penalties and superfund project cost were a tiny pittance of what that factory made them in that time. Our incident was so common it didn’t make the news, unlike in Holbrook, MA where a chemical company ignored the neighborhood kids constantly playing in old metal drums in a field near the factory which contained things like hexavelant chromium, to expected results. The company’s penalty? Well they have to fund the cleanup. All the kids and moms that died? Well… boy look at the great products that chemical factory made possible! Speaking of which:

> Just look back over the last 200 years, per…

Irrelevant “I heart capitalism” screed that doesn’t refute a single thing I said. You can’t ignore bad things people, institutions, and societies do because they weren’t bad to everybody. The Catholic priests that serially molested children probably each had a dossier of kind, generous, and selfless ways they benefited their community. The church that protected and enabled them does an incredible amount of humanitarian work around the world. Doesn’t matter.

> Masks

Come on now. Those businesses leaders had balls but none of them were crystal. What someone said in 2023 has no bearing on what businesses did in 2020 based on the best available science and their motivations for doing it. Just like you can’t call businesses unethical for exposing their workers to friable asbestos when medicine generally thought it was safe, you can’t call businesses ethical for refusing to let their workers protect themselves— on their own dime, no less— when medicine largely considered it unsafe.

Your responses to those two things in that gigantic pile of corporate malfeasance don’t really challenge anything I said.

[ETH_start]

>You can’t possibly say, in good faith, that it think this was legal, can you? Of course it wasn’t. It was totally legal discharging some of the less odious things into the river despite going through a residential neighborhood about 500 feet downstream

That is exactly my point. Nobody would dispute that bad things would happen if you don't have laws against dumping pollution in the commons and enforce those laws.

>Doesn’t matter.

It does matter when we're trying to compare the overall effect of various economic systems. Like the anti-capitalist one versus the capitalist one.

>What someone said in 2023 has no bearing on what businesses did in 2020 based on the best available science and their motivations for doing it.

Well that's an entirely different argument than you were making earlier. There was no evidence that masks outside of a hospital setting were a critical health necessity in 2021 and the intuition against allowing them for customer-facing employees proved sound in 2023 when comprehensive studies showed no health benefit from wearing them.

[ajmurmann]

Like with Cruise. One freak accident and they practically decided to go out of business. Oh wait...

[chefandy]

If that’s the only data point you look at in American industry, it would be pretty encouraging. I mean, surely they’d have done the same if they were a branch of a large publicly traded company with a big high-production product pipeline…

[monkeynotes]

> nobody knows why

But we do know the culpability rests on the shoulders of the humans who decided the tech was ready for work.

[ethbr1]

Hey look, it's almost like we're back at the end of the First Industrial Revolution (~1850), as society grapples with how to create happiness in a rapidly shifting economy of supply and demand, especially for labor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism#John_Stuart_M...

Pretty bloody time for labor though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair

[okasaki]

Wait, why would we want 10x more traffic fatalities?

[stavros]

We wouldn't, that's their point.