[hilbert42]

"…the operator asks him to do something in the waymo app he doesn't want to do it."

Why are you trying to offer an excuse for the inexcusable?

The app should have nothing to do with it. Where are the emergency stop and exit controls for the passenger? He should be able to exit the vehicle at any time.

I fed up with this bad tech and the fact that governments let Big Tech act irresponsibly to get away with this shit. Why aren't there regulations in place before this tech is allowed loose on an unsuspecting public?

If CEOs of tech companies were held directly responsible with the threat of jail time it'd stop almost instantly.

[Aloisius]

Jail time?

This poor man was forced to slowly circle around a parking lot eight times! It took over five minutes before they fixed the problem! He almost missed his flight! Outrage, outrage.

This is clearly worthy of the electric chair.

[hilbert42]

Reckon that's a bridge too far even for those miserable reprobates. Besides, it'd only take for a couple to be locked away to scare the shit out of rest of them. There's nothing like making an example out of a few to bring better behavior.

The real problem these days is that the culprits who perpetrate this shit are able to hide behind corporate walls—at worst the company gets fined (albeit rarely) but those who are actually responsible escape both freely and anonymously. Laws need to be changed to make employees directly accountable for their actions and to take the consequences.

Unfortunslely, introducing such laws is somewhat complicated and would meet with huge resistance for many reasons too involved to list here. Nevertheless, there's one I should mention, sometimes unavoidable mistakes occur (or important facts remain unknown) even after due diligence and rigorous testing. Laws should not hold individuals responsible for force majeure† (so-called acts of God) that they have no control over. Any change in the law would have to allow for this.

That said, we know damned well that that provision/exception is totally irrelevant in most of these cases/customer unfriendly fuck-ups, clearly they're as guilty as hell.

I'd advocate another change in the law in that shareholders need to be identifiable. We need a way of publicly embarrassing and shaming shareholders when they invest in 'carpetbagger' companies. To avoid shame investors who invested in good faith would be left with little option than to divest themselves of their shares. In effect, shareholders have to share the responsibility for a company's bad behavior and be seen doing so.

Mind you, I can't see this happening anytime soon, as many shareholders are just too greedy to allow laws like this to come into effect. Unfortunately, the political will just isn't there.

_

† A classic example of where hubris, cocksureness, cost cutting and insufficient engineering rigor — AND force majeure led to a disaster was the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. If engineering rigor had been followed to the letter and penny-pinching avoided then it's likely the bridge wouldn't have collapsed despite force majeure entering the scene (the physics of Kármán vortex street turbulence was not well understood at the time).