The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing
wired.com
wired.com
How is that legal in the US? It is insane that someone who clearly was acting in the interest of the public (albeit the rich, fee-paying public...) should be found at fault for doing something that is clearly morally correct.
I don't normally read Wired, bu this article is both morbidly fascinating and a great tale of human hubris.
"Settlement" does really say a judge oversaw the entire thing while a corporation bullied somebody working for the public interest into silence.
If you're implying that the judge was somehow complicit in helping OceanGate ('oversaw', meaning presided over and made decisions concerning), then please provide evidence of that?
So it's not a single judge, but the Judiciary Power collectively was absolutely complicit on the deed.
James Cameron put together the team that designed the DeepSea Challenger, which he took to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, far deeper than Titanic. One interesting tidbid (IIRC) is that they spent 3 years just designing the pressure vessel in software before they ever built anything, so precise the engineering had to be. And even then they did have some system failures on that dive but nothing catastrophic.
OceanGate was an exercise in hubris from people who didn't know better and didn't want to know better. It was pure ego from the uninformed. I personally found the general reaction to be fascinating too: it's like a whole bunch of people discovered class awareness and solidarity.
At that depth, I imagine they would be.
FTA: "up to 10,000 times, according to internal design documents."
That seems like an absurdly high amount.
> surely a higher bar
was that a pun?
The cost and risk, as compared to what was on offer never matched up.
The experience (whether worth the risk or not) was about the adventure and being down there, not the size of the view.
This is the sort of experience where I doubt the view was anywhere as good as what an unmanned vehicle that prioritized lighting and filming could capture. I suspect this was far more about being able to say “I spent $[huge amount of money] and got to see it with my own eyes” even though the view was probably pretty shit with everyone crowded around a small dome.
Basically the same reason people climb Everest and not peaks ‘nobody’ knows about that are a lot less crowded.
A cramped interior and a small window, making the thing feel harder and less attainable, amps up the excitement.
But to put your own life and others at risk making that move... whoooooooweeeeee, that's fully into batshit crazy land.
This event is just thinly veiled with a little bit more civility and tech progress.
But with one of the two though there are other humans not far away to send help, and land/open sea to rise up if you see a problem emerging.
In space it can be nightmare to get any help or get back if something goes wrong.
It was a strange and isolating feeling the first time something broke underway, and I realized there wasn’t someone to ask how to fix it. It’s also a great builder of grit and determination, or of hopelessness. People tend to go one way or the other.
Being awakened with a flooding alarm when drills were not scheduled, for example – I realized afterwards (as did everyone else, I assume) that if faced with an actual emergency, I could keep my cool and work the problem. [0] It’s a good feeling, especially when you know you can trust the other 100+ people around you to do the same. Incidentally, it was not technically flooding (unplanned water ingestion at a rate greater than the capacity of dewatering systems), but sure as hell looked scary when they demonstrated the flow rate seen later.
[0]: I personally think this is why Navy Nukes (especially submariners) make great SREs. The fact that a Nuke helped build Google’s SRE program probably helps.
No, but it's 99% more likely than to get someone to help in space...
I mean, privileged rich dude who thinks he knows better than experts wins Darwin award, and some people dumb enough to trust him got to go along for the (one way) ride.
I'm not any more disturbed by it now than I was a year ago, and a year ago it barely moved the needle. And then it was only about the 19 year old son of one of the passengers -- even at that age, a child ought to be able to trust his father to keep him safe, and Shahzada Dawood utterly failed on that count.
The 19-year old son is eligible, though he won’t win the award because he was peer-pressured by his dad.
So everyone in the sub are eligible now.
I personally paid scant attention to this story, mostly only observing how much of a media frenzy there was around it. Sure, it's fine to write up a story on what led up to the failure of the sub and fine for ppl to be interested in that story. But it's not a 'world shocking' nor particularly disturbing story. (I can think of things going on right now that are both shocking the world and truly disturbing, but I won't go there. Suffice to say that we devalue language when we use it sensationally.)
Sad story, really. These people at least died while actively pursuing a dream, though it finished in a dramatic way. This is unlike so many people in Gaza or Ukraine just to mention what pop out of my mind. :’(
As I understand it, the passengers were made aware of the risks.
https://www.businessinsider.com/read-oceangate-waiver-titan-...
From people asking them to sign this who otherwise hand-waived the risks away?
But I have read several articles on the story and show a dozen or more videos, so.
"American amateurism in matters of life and death"
I'm a Canadian. As a Millenial of the "just watch a Youtube video and figure it out" generation, and somebody who has watched some things (like housing) get strangled by regulation, I can see the appeal of American libertarianism on a lot of subjects.
But as Vonnegut said: matters of life and death.
Better rules of thumb are “whether externalities are internalized”, “asymmetry in upside vs downside”, “ability to measure outcomes”.
How do you know this?
Seems a remarkably similar sentiment to the e/acc types currently loudly influencing tech and business discourse on various media.
End the human race by transferring all our consciousnesses to the immortal AI mainframe? A-OK!
End the human race for a fancy new sub design? Not effective. :(
Which in the world of regulated engineering disciplines usually translates to new regulations to prevent the newly discovered failure modes. The point of regulation isn't to eliminate 100% of bad engineering, it's to rigorously define and enforce the current standard of good engineering so that the vast majority of cases don't fail.
Re-wind the clock:
- A google engineer says "google has AGI"... this leaks and is dismissed.
- MS writes a paper that says GPT has hints of AGI.
- OpenAI signs deal with MS saying they can have everything OpenAI does till they hit AGI.
That last one. Thats not a bet you make if you think AGI is a decade away. Its a bet you make if you think your close.
OpenAI thought that they were close. They fell for the classic AI trap of "if only we had a bigger model". They got high on their own supply and thought that some sort of tipping point would come with size or scale. That a bigger model with MORE data and MORE information would have AGI, sapience or sentience emerge.
It was a bad bet. Q* isnt going to get there, the LLM line is dead.
Why do you need to worry about safety or super alignment if you arent going to get to AGI. They left because there is no THERE, there..
They left because they lost the power struggle.
If your safety oriented, and your company is close to AGI you stay regardless. Your boss isnt going to push you out because you leave and scream "it will kill us all"... All the safety people have been doing that for years, now they are quite.
If you aren't close, or realize "we're never getting there" leaving, vesting makes sense. There's NO existential risk.
Talk of AGI is hubris, vanity and snake oil.
Can you imagine a world without rules? Awful.
Is this a tasteless pun ?
In the essence of that argument at least, they're right. His using a prototype he knew to be a failure to then explore the ocean with customers aboard, under the same conditions as those that caused its test failure, is criminally negligent.
However, pointing to all sorts of mistakes and gambles small or large as narratives towards a full blown condemnation of extremely dangerous efforts is mistaken I think:
In the world of exploring extremely harsh environments, some heavy risk is inevitable even if you do everything you know of right. In such contexts, something could go catastrophically wrong just as easily as it could all end successfully and a narrative will be constructed for why either was the case even if either outcome was interchangeably plausible..
Pushing immediate blame on someone for something going wrong in an inherently risky activity is to fall into this above narrative trap. It also implies the idea that people who do dangerous but potentially worthy things are wrong for doing so because they didn't have perfect foresight.
That implies that what they were doing was somehow pioneering. It wasn’t. Deepsea explorers and the oil and gas industry have used submersibles at those depths for decades and their safety profile is very well understood. There are facilities to test them and procedures to make sure they’re safe before anyone risks their life. All Rush did was make a poorly designed, poorly tested submersible with the wrong materials where he cut corners left and right. TFA is just a laundry list of criminal negligence.
The Titan passengers make up the bulk of the fatalities from civilian submersibles this century. Save for military submarines and the occasional industrial accident, they’ve been extremely safe.
My wider point was more about how in certain fields, those who strive for certain achievements often do similarly risky things and only get called out if there is a catastrophic failure. If they succeed, they're often lauded. Also, in some areas it really is impossible to avoid mistakes, and those who get criticized for making them are often only those who got unlucky instead of actually negligent. This doesn't apply in the case of Titan though, since he made multiple glaring mistakes that he could have corrected and was urged to do so by known experts in parts design.
And even then, USN submarines are absurdly over-engineered. Or more aptly, they’re engineered to survive a massively hostile environment, even under multiple worst-case scenarios. FFS, the USS San Francisco slammed into an underwater mountain at flank speed at a depth of over 500 feet, and still managed to surface and get home under her own power. New sonar dome, ballast tanks, etc. and she was released for duty for another eight years.
This is only possible when you have multiple, redundant systems for everything.
He is like one of the inventors of the parachute (Franz Karl Reichelt), still wanted to try because he believed in it.
Unfortunately believing is not enough when it comes to reliability.
Effort was good though, as apparently it worked at some point.
> This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even returned to the site for expeditions the next two years. But nearly one year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan dove to the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people onboard, including Rush himself
which could explain why they sell tickets.
I'm sure SpaceX already knows the rockets won't make it back intact, but they still launch anyway (despite the losses).
That's substantially more successful than Soyuz which crashed a lot more and killed someone by parachute failure and crew by depressurisation (and another crew escaped the exploding rocket by launch abort system and another abort subjected the crew to a 21G descent) in the early days and is still considered one of the safer rockets ever (Soyuz-U, the rocket, had 22 failures out of 786 launches, and Soyuz, the spacecraft on top, made 153 missions).
There's still a long future in front of us for SpaceX to screw it up by skimping on things or run into some very bad luck or unforseen issues, but at least as it stands now, pointing at test launches going bang, when they're weren't ever expected to not go bang, and calling the production rocket unreliable is not well supported.
And even Musk personally acknowledged that he nearly tanked SpaceX early on - because they didn't have experienced engineering lead to take the project - and he ended up hiring one when they scraped enough on government money to get there.
I'm certain they don't have this attitude with manned trips.
Pioneers can go to great lengths to overpromise safety, budget, and timeline to secure funding.
Not saying this is wise, but at least he went with the customers, so he was all-in with them.
Stockton Rush himself during his public interventions made it clear such explorations were scary and dangerous:
"it made a lot of noise, which is a very sphincter-tightening experience".
With how rich this guy was, and based on the article, it was probably hubris anyways.
It's the fifth mission or something, and worked for two years.
They actually went to the Titanic with that sub and previously succeeded to reach the Titanic, then it's later on, that the vehicle started to become fragile due to multiple reuses.
> It's the fifth mission or something, and worked for two years.
Interesting how? I'm reminded of a quote from a famous failure analysis:
> We have also found that certification criteria used in [Mission] Readiness Reviews often develop a gradually decreasing strictness. The argument that the same risk was [deployed] before without failure is often accepted as an argument for the safety of accepting it again. Because of this, obvious weaknesses are accepted again and again, sometimes without a sufficiently serious attempt to remedy them, or to delay a [mission] because of their continued presence.
There sure does seem to be a lot of strong expert advice that was willfully ignored, per the article, that their materials choices, testing methodology, and damage monitoring system were setting them up for exactly the disaster that occurred.
“Beneath the waves” was right out.
There absolutely is.
Hubris, stupidity, learning from the mistakes of others.
Blaming him is a giant, flashing sign.
DON'T BE THAT GUY
... was it? They didn't test enough and the tests they could be bothered to do, failed. Then they shipped anyway and he got himself and several other people killed.
A non-charitable interpretation of these events could be made that it was an elaborate and long-term murder/suicide.