Re:Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
by ascorbic on Monday March 19, 2018 @04:08PM
(#16622597)
Nobody in their right mind would work with such liability without insurance, which is all well and good for civil liability, but insurance won't help if you're going to jail.
Re:Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
by prepend on Monday March 19, 2018 @11:59PM
(#16625953)
I think we may be arguing different things.
Almost all employees have the possibility of criminal negligence based on their work. For programmers, this could mean that if you fuck up the code for a pacemaker and someone dies, you could go to jail. That’s a big risk and I can’t find any programmer who has been found culpable for someone’s death. This is the current law in the US.
If Uber was negligent in its code, then the programmers could go to jail. They have programmers and they work and assume this extremely low risk.
Now maybe you’re arguing that some special law should or should not exist for Uber drivers.
But there are many industries where civil liabilities are required. In fact, any software independent consultant is civilly liable for their work, but it’s not specific to software.
IEEE has a section in their member toolkit that goes into why professional liability insurance is needed, https://m.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/discounts/...
The costs aren’t that high or at least they weren’t 15 years ago when I purchased it for less than $1k/year for $1M in coverage. Most people need this even if they think they are safe. If you’re the one who wrote the deployment script that erased $1M in data, it won’t be entirely mitigated that the script made it through qa.
Also interesting is that the engineer who wrote the Uber software is currently liable for criminal negligence, like pretty much everyone else. But you would have to prove culpability. I can’t find any examples of software engineers convicted so it’s hard to tell who goes to jail-developer, qa, or executive.
More info on criminal/civil negligence- https://www.theblanchlawfirm.com/?practice-areas=criminal-ne...