The first person who walked the final path. Everyone who agreed with that person and walked the same path compounded his decision. Everyone who crossed the field should have thought about what they were doing at the time.

Far too many people, and especially developers, are way more focused on absolving themselves from responsibility for anything bad than they are willing to put the thought in at the beginning, and that's the root cause of a lot of problems.

But that person could not possibly have predicted the future actions of everyone else, and therefore it's a mockery of moral reasoning to hold them responsible.

What are we holding them responsible for? Was something amoral? They clearly made the first decision for better or worse. Now if there was a sign that said "No walking on the grass", they clearly violated something.

And that's just it. Humanity has carved a path that says, "Make as much money as possible with the least amount of effort."

These machines have taken something we already know is bad, the 90 day, quarterly earnings cycle, which had already obliterated our long-term thinking down to nanoseconds and we want it even shorter.

We have machines moving virtual money around corporations that use money to move real material around the earth -- and beyond.

That is the path we are on right now in this very moment.

Who is going to put a sign up saying, "STOP! Humanity Restoration in Progress. Please choose another path."

Other systems may or may not be created in a similar fashion.

I'm aware of how they work. I'm arguing that someone who builds a system is responsible for it even if they don't know how it works. Ignorance, even in the face of a system so complex that no person could ever understand the underlying causes of what it does, is not an excuse. No one should be able to hide behind complexity.

Developers must either build in protections against their systems going wrong or they shouldn't deploy them.

Every step of the development ladder is fraught with possibilities for error and catastrophe. To quote James Goldman:

"It is too simple. Life, if it's like anything at all, is like an avalanche. To blame the little ball of snow that starts it all, to say it is the cause, is just as true as it is meaningless."

Yes.

That wouldn't even be a change to the current system. That's how it works now. If you take on the role of CEO and it turns out that years earlier the company did something terrible you will be expected to resign. It's one of the reasons they demand so much money.

Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of career CEOs are good hardworking people. Like any high profile position, the outliers skew perception for everyone.

Every organism since the first one has been focused on its individual survival. Interested only in the propagation of its own DNA.

And yeah, humans are still doing that. Everyone who took that path. Everyone who keeps taking that path of survival of the fittest.

We need to start thinking of the survival of the all of us.

(Source: Have walked through fields.)

Desire paths: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/oct/05/desire-paths-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_of_least_resistance

The path is optimized for A) Where people enter and B) Where they are going. If there is no purpose. A path is simply a path, and ascribing meaning to it is fruitless.

- Whoever gave cachet to certain characteristics that are present at specific points of the grass

- Whoever made it desirable or necessary that passersby reach a certain location at the periphery of the field

- Whoever set up restrictions to entry at certain locations around the periphery of the field

- Whoever made any changes to the field (including non-human intervention)

More generally, culture at large and historical precedent.

—

Imagine a green field of grass.

There are minor differences across the field, but some of these differences can be noticed: a slightly darker patch of grass, a slightly yellowed patch of grass, some stones of varying sizes, a section that is slightly raised from the rest of the field.

Around the field, other things can catch the eye: there's a road to one side, some trees of varying sizes, one currently in bloom.

Over the seasons, the profile of this grass changes. At some point there was a park bench to one side of the field; later, it was moved to another side. There was once a storefront near to one side of the field.

Fairytales are useful, but they often hide the real truth.

Who is the man holding the smoking gun when algorithms collapse? The business owner is legally left with the responsibility, but finding who programmed the algo to make a mistake is useful & vital.

If the bridge collapses you get sued and your insurance pays out. You probably don't get more insurance.

This is not a perfect system, but we need several elements of it for algorithms. We need the ideas of tolerances, confidence intervals and analysis - certification of fitness for purpose must be limited and constrained to have value. We need professional certification that enables employers and the public to recognize experience and capability. People have confidence in pilots because of their uniforms, qualifications and the checks that they undertake (training, retraining, blood testing, medicals) on a regular basis. As we have seen with the 737 max, when these things breakdown there's trouble.

A decision to follow the herd and a decision to take the easiest road are still decisions.

You might say that a person made a decision to break down blades of grass to create a path and that others chose to take a path already created, but they are still making choices that they are responsible for.

Answer: All of them.

Imagine a groundskeeper.

Imagine a small box where every day at 6 am, an instruction on paper is written and the groundskeeper checks it.

Imagine a network of voters who vote on the instruction to be placed in the box. Their wide variety of votes will be automatically distilled into the winning instruction.

The groundskeeper dutifully clears a path, shouts at people to stay on the path, fills in errant paths.

Finally there is one path.

Who made the decision?

I only bring this up to suggest “emergent” decisions is a vapid framework to analyze this. Every phenomenon involving the aggregation of different agents is an emergent one, whether it’s an emergent system of politics leading to regulated actions or an emergent system of market participants leading to a price.

This doesn’t distinguish a situation of high regulation from a situation of low regulation.