Amazon liable for crash because software “micromanages” delivery drivers | Hacker News Reader

Amazon liable for crash because software “micromanages” delivery drivers

arstechnica.com

33 pointscarride10 comments

Remember when the pizza companies backburnered the X minutes or it's free because their drivers killed people? Amazon must have a shorter memory than the 1990's.

Uncle Enzo remembers.

Chisled spam.

https://sites.google.com/a/trinity.edu/snow-crash-fall-2016/...

The beginning of the rapid end of human delivery drivers, assuming that other courts agree with this.

There's no question that at least the contracting company is responsible. The issue is that if giant companies can offload liability onto contractors, you create a strong incentive to make sure all liability hits bankruptcy proceedings before ever reaching you. After all, you can always replace one one million dollar contractor with another when you're making hundreds of billions per year.

It's not even that hard a problem to fix: decrease delivery quotas by 20%, and track speed limit violations. That's all, easy to implement, and wouldn't be an insane economic burden (compared to offloading costs of eg medical care onto the general public).

>There's no question that at least the contracting company is responsible.

Nope. I beg to differ. Set unreasonable quotas? You are ultimately at fault. People that toss out "Thou shalt"s must be tightly coupled to the consequences of their actions.

No, the contracting company is not responsible. They source people. Amazon controller the implementation details of the job. If someone on contract is asked to do the impossible, and does so in good faith, the contractor is free and clear.

Yes, the American Contractor had best be savvy, and we could seriously use some "Contracting 101" somewhere in the formal education process in the States, but just because you hired someone on contract to do something legally questionable doesn't magically make your offloaded to guy the evildoer. You hired it out and set the ground rules.

>The issue is that if giant companies can offload liability onto contractors, you create a strong incentive to make sure all liability hits bankruptcy proceedings before ever reaching you.

What makes you think they don't structure for the bankruptcy bit anyway?

'just because you hired someone on contract to do something legally questionable doesn't magically make your offloaded to guy the evildoer'

no. but it does diffuse the responsibility and open up plausible deniability.

Which is why there needs to be clear culpability on the contracting out party. No diffusion of culpability. The contracting relationship is little more than a tool for cupabilitove obfuscation otherwise, which is just how it's applied.

The contractor is most definitely responsible. That's like saying a murderer wouldn't be liable as long as he was a contract killer.

Both the contractor and the company that contracted them and most likely the driver themself would likely have liability.

If the delivery companies can't handle the simple proposition of being liable for their employees' actions like every other company is, then good riddance.

Does anyone have a link to any of the court documents? I'm curious what their legal basis for this is, and I can't find any actual legalese.

Amazon being liable doesn't sound likely to me, but perhaps they've actually found a way to do it.

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