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If Boeing hadn't subscribed to the view that pilots were an inconvenient expense to be slowly dispensed with with ever more "sophisticated" automation like MCAS they also wouldn't be in this situation.

It's uncomfortable to think about but a management fashion that silicon valley helped promulgate killed those 600 people.

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Boeing didn’t create the MCAS system because they thought it was a superior design or a labor saving mechanism. They did it to compensate for bad design of the physical plane.

And if the pilots had been trained to turn it off at the right time it would have been safe. They weren't (the plane was advertised as requiring no new training), and boeing made MCAS deliberately hard to turn off.

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