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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Not only this, but Mr. Levandowski has made it clear he thinks his car failing to cause the first self-driving fatality would mean they were behind.

The man believes manslaughter is the cost of doing business for innovation. He should be in prison for much more than he got.

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Although it might be tempting, you can’t really send people to prison for disagreeing with your ethics.

much imprisonment is based on just this, even if an action is required to send you on the road to prison your ethics are used as indicator of whether you should actually go there or not.

I truly hope that most laws have some basis in ethics where getting people killed is unethical.

Reckless endangerment is a thing, you know.

Source? That is pretty horrifying if true

> Last summer, after a man died in a Tesla that was using the car’s Autopilot system, which allows for autonomous driving on highways, Levandowski told several Uber engineers that they were not pushing aggressively enough. “I’m pissed we didn’t have the first death,” Levandowski said, according to a person familiar with the conversation. (Levandowski denies saying this.)

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/inside-uber-lawsuits...

The first death in a powered airplane was where one of the Wrights crashed carrying a passenger, and he died.

Should the airplane have never been invented and the Wrights jailed for trying?

There's a difference between accepting the costs of progress and actively wanting to be indirectly responsible for death.

>> The man believes manslaughter is the cost of doing business for innovation

> There's a difference between accepting the costs of progress

I'm not seeing the essential difference here.

P.S. I know nothing about Levandowski, his beliefs, or his statements. Just commenting on what the parent wrote.

I'm also only commenting on what the parent wrote to be fair. My point is that being disappointed not to be involved in a death - as that comment suggests - is a level of callousness that goes well beyond accepting the cost of progress.

Since I don't know the man, I prefer to be charitable and am willing to assume he was just being inept in his choice of phrasing rather than assuming he is evil.

I worked on the stab trim gearbox design for the Boeing 757. That gearbox is "flight critical", meaning total failure of it means a crash. I'm very proud that the stab trim system has never caused an accident in the service history of the 757. (Of course, the design was an iteration on the highly successful 747 equivalent, not anything revolutionary.)

Ok, it's fine to make different assumptions about the context. I think you could have made it clearer in your initial response that that's how you saw it.

Here's the context in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25847994

"Levandowski denies saying this."

If I had said it, and was currently being put on trial for a lot of my other behavior, I'd deny it too.

Where do you get this "the airplane should never have been invented" from? Nobody has made an argument even remotely like that.

What was said, at the most, was that maybe the Wright brothers should have had to face consequences for endangering that passenger. That maybe they acted recklessly.

I don't think that carrying that particular passenger was the one crucial step towards inventing airplanes.

Yes, what is the difference between a passenger willingly getting on an experimental airplane that subsequently crashed and an entirely unrelated pedestrian mowed down by an Uber SUV as a fully predictable consequence of their trash engineering practices?

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