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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

It's sort of like your neighbor having an automated lawnmower, and you knowing that with a careful placement of rocks the image recognition will fritz and it will happily start mowing into your yard, over your petunias and possibly your small children and animals. You're fairly certain that there are other problems with it you don't know about as well.

Do you force the situation and make it mow into your yard and over a bunch of rocks to destroy it, or do you live with the danger?

I don't have an answer. In this situation you could at least talk to your neighbor. Without the ability to feasibly do that, I'm not sure I would fault either action.

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Think about it. If you have kids or pets or flowers, seems like it would be prudent trigger the event in a more safe, and known environment than to leave to chance (of injury to property or 3rd party). Seems like talking to the neighbor happened over a decade ago to me.

Sure, depending on the chances of it happening. The problem is that we don't know what the chances are, and as a species we're fairly bad at assessing stuff like that in general. If it's a million-to-one chance, there are probably plenty of other more worthy perils to be concerned with first. If it's a hundred-to-one chance, it may be an imminent threat. Which is it? How do you trust that the person telling you the odds isn't vastly over or under estimating the chances?

The answer falls into an area that's somewhat unknowable with current information, which is why I can't fault either behavior.

I disagree. We know that the probability of it happening again is very high, seeing as it has already happened multiple times, and no serious action has been taken to improve the situation. If we were speculating about a theoretical risk, I would agree with you.

I think the issue is less the chance of the lawnmower going wild by itself (because screw that, I don't care how small the chance is, it's not acceptable), and more the chance of the lawnmower exploding, taking out your eye when you trigger it's failure it yourself.

As in, "the chance of getting hacked" < "the chance of the vigilante creating dangerous situations".

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