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Comment by Symmetry | Hacker News Reader

I'd really like to see self-driving car liability treated the same way airline crashes are. Less "whose fault is this" and more "how can we prevent this same accident from ever happening again?" The second is the really important question and the one we need to keep answering to reduce the toll of driving deaths. This will mean the cars driving on our roads getting more and more regulated over time but I'm quite OK with that.

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Airline crashes absolutely are treated as "whose fault is this". That's why airline crashes usually have lots of lawsuits, with millions of dollars of damages, filed after they happen.

Every NTSB report has a "probable cause" section determining who or what was at fault. And then the FAA hands out fines and courts award additional damages largely based on that finding.

It is true that the punishments aren't handled by the NTSB but that's more about separation of concerns & departmental remits than anything else. Is separating out "fault finding" from "punishments" a good idea? Maybe? I honestly don't know.

> Every NTSB report has a "probable cause" section determining who or what was at fault. And then the FAA hands out fines and courts award additional damages largely based on that finding.

In case everyone is not aware, NTSB reports cannot be used in court to establish fault or otherwise be used as evidence when seeking compensation for damages.

"No part of a report of the Board, related to an accident or an investigation of an accident, may be admitted into evidence or used in a civil action for damages resulting from a matter mentioned in the report." 49 USC 1154(b)

I have a question..

In criminal cases what happens with inadmissible evidence? Like fruit of poisonous tree doctrine... what if you literally have video proof and tons of other graphic proof of a murder, you really just ignore it and let the perp go back into society?

if you have tons of proof about a murder, it's almost certain to fall under one of the exceptions to the doctrine. e.g, if law enforcement would have discovered the evidence anyway, it is not excluded.

In principle, it’s inadmissible. So, theoretically, yes. The perp just goes free. Not very common for a lot of reasons.

There are exceptions to the doctrine for exactly the reasons you mention. The legal system isn't as insane as people like to make it out to be.

The part you missed is probably the post mortem investigations are why air travel is the safest form of transportation.

> "how can we prevent this same accident from ever happening again?"

It would be nice if society adopted this with all crimes. It's not like we can prove we're any different than the low level design of a machine; when it comes to the "free will" ideology currently the justice system is designed around.

This. For me believing in free will is just another type of religion. It makes us feel safer and that we're in control. I think is useful for that, but we're deluding ourselves.

And I just realized you're being downvoted. How surprising.

Even if free will is an illusion it my be maladaptive to design a justice system without consequences for perceived faults.

It may be the downfall of humanity progress as well and things may change.

I am not advocating a 'justice' system without consequences. You will have consequences. Consequences are just another input into our brains that do help deter some people from some behaviours. I don't kill people because I'd go to jail. I don't kill people because I don't want to hurt them (and that is on my programming, upbringing, possibly nature to a degree as well). I think the only way I'd kill someone is by accident or in a spur of the moment when emotionally disturbed by an incident (me or my family fear for our lives). Society has mostly accounted for those cases and I may not even go to jail if I did it, because people largely can relate to those situations and they agree it's not 'fair' send me to jail for them. However, there's several sectors of the population no one seems to be able or want to relate to (poor people that got little opportunities and guidance in life, abused people, mentally ill, psychopaths, a mix of all of that etc), and the people creating the rules therefore decide to 'punish' them in the name of justice for being bad and because we have not devised (and not invested enough time either) a better and more humane way to deal with them. In theory we want them to be reformed, in practice, is mostly about retribution and putting undesirables away.

We just can't help downvoting him.

Since everyone was socially conditioned to desire and believe in free will. Similar to the past with God but I would have been hanged. It will change and it’s her not him.

Of course it’s a religion. People are deluded to think otherwise.

Well if you stop viewing it as fault and instead view it as incentives it makes sense. If you (intentionally) murder somebody, you still need to be punished (even if technically "you" are not at "fault" because it's not "you" it's just the algorithm running in your brain) so that others will be disincentivised to do the same thing in the future (i.e. the algorithm running in most people's brains will take the potential punishment into account when calculating whether the crime makes sense or not).

To a large extent we already do that, e.g. many countries have upper limit in punishment (like 30 years jail max), or allow criminals to delete their criminal past after some time has passed, not because that "just" or "fair" or whatever, but simply because it's "effective".

I agree with you, and I think you also agree is not quite effective. It's a factor in deterrence, but we need to do more to understand people that still commits crimes and solve more of the root causes. We won't achieve perfection probably but we can do a lot better IMO.

I think we need to educate people how free will is an illusion and because it would help in preventing the root causes.

Whether or not free will exists (I'm a compatiblist) there are certain cases where the threat of punishment will cause people to change how they act and there are certain cases where it won't. If it were the case the the people at Uber intended to kill someone then the threat of punishment might have prevented that and Elain Herzberg would still be alive. But as the people at Uber did not expect that their actions would result in her death the threat of punishment isn't going to be very effective at preventing deaths like hers.

The distinctions our legal system makes regarding coercion, mens rea, insanity, etc are mostly trying to get at this same underlying distinction.

Society by and large does do this, just not with a grandiose show at every "incident".

"Whoa, there sure are a lot of fights at bars we have to keep responding to! Maybe those would happen less if we had fines for bartenders that had too many fights? Or maybe if they had to get a license that we could revoke if they weren't preventing fights?"

"Whoa, it seems that a lot of people don't own guns, but then go and buy one when they get pissed and shoot somebody. Maybe that would happen less if we had waiting periods?"

I do like this idea, where legal action is more about preventing the event reoccuring rather than revenge or payback. Unfortunately "an eye for an eye" is a very strong instinct and will take a lot of education to allow society as a whole to move beyond.

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