He was building a series of tunnels beneath a bomb shelter to protect himself from an impending nuclear war with North Korea.
He’s not weird, he’s crazy.
The problem is not that he built some tunnels. The problem is that he lethally endangered his employee. Rich people make tasteless decisions all the time (for proof, drive through any tony suburb). It is important that their tastelessness not be negligent.
I do think there's a huge double standard where companies get treated better than individuals, but I also think that this guy ignored enough regulations regarding construction that he should definitely be held liable for this death.
I expect that a lot of people here would prefer not to be personally liable because some bug they were responsible for caused a significant financial loss much less an injury even though they worked for a company.
If you are an individual, you should probably set up a corporate structure and take out insurance.
Your example about a software bug is a great one- that would clearly be a civil issue in most cases, but in the case that the law was broken in the process (say, a car company explicitly programs their vehicles to have lower emissions during testing than they do in real world scenarios) then you should expect some jailtime[1].
So going back to my example- if people follow the law but kill someone during testing (such as with Uber) then they probably shouldn't be held criminally liable, but if they are breaking the law (like comma.ai did) and kill someone as a result I would be shocked if they weren't held criminally liable.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/6/16743308/volkswagen-olive...
Does that mean that he was unable to get out of the tunnel by himself? If the poor guy was trapped in a hole with no way out then you could argue that this goes beyond being a simple accident.
I say this as someone who does a great deal of unprofessional carpentry, electrical work, mechanical repair, excavation, plumbing, etc. for myself and for family members. I would never have gone willingly into that hole. I certainly would never have asked anyone else to do so. No unexploited worker would have done this work.
- an underground multi-level beach hut: https://youtu.be/AojTrc_UMaM
- apocalypse bunker under his shed: https://youtu.be/KO25JYAaJC0
Property owners should be able to do their own work on their own property or act as their own general contractors. Disallowing that is right up there with gated communities that tell you exactly how tall your grass should be but that's the only way to prevent this kind of thing. I don't think everone's (already highly limited) right do what they want on their own property should be further curtailed because of one bad actor.
Yes that would have been too expensive for Beckwitt, and he would have never been able to get permits for it. That would have been society functioning correctly.
The particular malice here, I believe, was that he was texted about an emergency, and did not respond in a timely manner.
As cold and cynical it is, what the self-driving car "pioneers" are doing -- it's not nearly as reckless (and flat-out clueless) as what this guy did.
We don't allow people to drive without seatbelts because of the risk of them losing control and causing avoidable fatalities but half-baked autonomous machines vaguely guessing about what might be in front of them are perfectly ok?
Disclaimer: Written from my Model S at a Supercharger, having driven over 10k miles on autopilot/navigate on autopilot in the last 6 months
Auto-steer is just one step above radar cruise control, which is also semi-autonomous and hugely buggy. Shipping cars come with radar cruise which suddenly turns off below 25 mph, presumably because radar processing is imprecise with position. No one is crusading to ban it.
Furthermore, using a massive training set comparing against human interventions is precisely how you get up the safety curve given the current tech approach, which will never suffice for full autonomy sans humans.
To simply all those considerations down to "double standards is crazy" literally puts them on the same plane of judgable circumstances.
You have something against the pursuit for automotive driving which is understandable/admirable, but to do so like this is cheapening both sides.
In order for this to happen he had ignore this body of safe practice knowledge that has been built up. Safety regulations are written in blood and to ensure that more blood isn't spilt unsafe practices that result in death have to be punished.
I don't think that there is an equivalent with the autonomous cars issue. It is a young field and we still don't know what the acceptable practices are in it.