Is arguably the whole problem with our industry in a nutshell. The more relevant and largely ignored question should be "how this affects human beings".

If you ask a question "through the lense of technology" ("Can we solve this hard computer-vision problem"?) you arrive at different answers to those you would get if you ask the question through (say) the lense of societal benefits or humanity's relationship to technology ("Is it ok for a badly programmed computer to accidentally kill someone"?).

I say this not to criticise the enormous benefit this technology could bring, but rather to provoke us to think about the implications of the technologies that we are creating outside the confines of an IDE.

That this event doesn't necessarily reflect a larger trend is not incorrect--it's just that it's obvious. That self-driving cars could potentially reduce fatalities in the future is not only obvious, it's also somewhat off-topic when the story is that a person just died.

So my question is, when a computer kills a person, can't we do better? Better than stating the obvious, and better than being dismissive.