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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I confess this line always upset me. It is cute, but it directly points to the idea that the main recourse for a mistake is to take umbridge with an individual that must have obviously been wrong.

No. If a mistake is made and it impacts people, take action to make the impacted people whole and change the system so that a similar mistake won't be made again. If you want, you can argue that the system can be held accountable and changed.

Further, if there is evidence of a bad actor that is purposely making choices that hurt people. Take action on that. But accountability of actors in the system is almost certainly immune by policy. And for good reason.

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A system!!! Held accountable!!!! A system, just like a computer, cannot be held accountable for the reason that a system, as like a computer, is not alive and cannot actual be held accountable in a way that the system or computer cares.

But what is a system made of? People who are doing bad decisions and should be held accountable for that. Without accountability of bad actors in systems, you get companies committing crimes because no one at the top rarely sees fines or jail time. The same immunity from responsibility you think is a good thing in a system is what I would say is corporate america’s major sin.

You’re upset at the line because you make a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means for someone to be held accountable for something.

This hits the nail on the head. The issue is that humans are accountable, but systems are not. And smart humans learned how to hide behind systems to avoid accountability. That's the whole strategy of using corporations, a social structure that removes individuals from responsibility. A corporation can do pretty much anything, including criminal acts, and the humans benefiting from it are shield from the negative results except for financial losses. What we're seeing is just the whole strategy moving into the level of computer systems (and Google has already used this accountability skirting strategy for more than two decades).

The problem you will quickly run into is individuals cannot take the load that this line of thinking leads to. Accidentally typo an extra 0 on a payment process? Hope you have the funds to take accountability on that mistake. After all, we have taken the choice that the system cannot be operated to rollback any choice, as that would lower human accountability...

Then that person should have the right to refuse, ask for appropriate compensation or insurance. It's often argued here that the C-suite earns their high compensation by taking on those risks. So let the CFO fatfinger those unchecked transfers if he wishes.

But if rollbacks are possible and cheap then we need all that much accountability. People want accountability when there's no rollback possible, e.g. when decisions leads to deaths or life-years wasted.

Your last sentence is basically my disagreement and push, here? Systems can be made so that they can be rolled back. More, systems that oversee life and death situations often have to act faster than a human can respond to them.

I'm all for trying to get personal accountability to lead to a personal liability as much as we want. That, just isn't going to happen.

So, if you want to change the manual page in question to be that systems should be reversible or "fixable", for whatever that means, sure. But "management decisions" are usually among the most reversible choices any company will ever make.

> smart humans learned how to hide behind systems to avoid accountability

And "systems" is more general in this sense than just technology. Consider stoning, and firing squads. Both were invented to remove individual responsibility.

But your reading presumes that you would hold individuals responsible in a company for something that goes wrong. Which, without showing intent on individual actors, feels very very unlikely. Both in actuality, and in desire.

Consider, if it is found that salmonella contaminated the spinach of a local farm, I want it recalled and for better systems in place to catch contamination. I don't want to find the farmer that was responsible for the acre of land that introduced the contaminant.

I think this idea flows from some thought that people will put more effort into things that they think they could be held accountable for. In reality, that just isn't the case. People will instead stall and stall on things they think they could be held accountable on if things go south.

From my vantage, that style of "accountability" just leads to more and more red tape as you do what you can to line item identify who could have prevented something. That is not productive.

> Consider, if it is found that salmonella contaminated the spinach of a local farm, I want it recalled and for better systems in place to catch contamination. I don't want to find the farmer that was responsible for the acre of land that introduced the contaminant.

Wow a local farm!!!! We must think of the plight of the local farmer! And not the multinational corporations!

Consider, if it is found that listeria contaminated the meat of a national Chain, Boar's Head, I want it recalled and for better systems in place to catch contamination. I also want the plant manager and executives who allowed for the massively unsanitary state to continue for years.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/09/10th-person-dead-in-...

The way you're talking , we should be going back to pre-Upton Sinclair The Jungle and letting our food run full of contaminants because why make any one person accountable for their willful addition of sawdust to their flour?

If there is provable negligence on the plant manager for allowing it, I'm game for them getting in trouble. My point was more that there are a TON of individuals that can each be shown to have done something specific to spread the problem. We don't hold them accountable. By design.

Now, I'm all for more directly holding companies responsible. Such that I think they probably deserve less protections than they almost certainly have here. But that is a different thing and, again, is unrelated to "a person taking accountability."

You do not need intent to find fault and have standing. Negligence is a thing.

If your farmer chose to ignore industry standard practices and agricultural regulations to prevent and contain such contamination at the source, they are indeed liable. And they can still issue a recall, and indeed must do so as soon as they learn of the problem.

Your vantage point is a bit too optimistic for reality. If it was not, we would not need courts.

Fair that negligence would be a legally separate thing than "at-fault." I'm using the colloquial use of the terms here, for somewhat obvious reasons.

For my example, assume no knowledge of extra risk by anyone on the line. If you'd rather, consider the cashier at the local burrito shop that was the final non-consumer hand to touch the contaminated food.

I think I am closer to understanding you, but not quite there.

If, for instance, your burrito worker did something egregious, they could be held criminally liable, and depending on the specific situation, the employer could also be held civilly liable.

I say "depending on the situation" because it is the duty of the vendor to ensure best practices are followed: sanitary restrooms, soap and running, clean water for cleaning up, etc. And a nontrivial number of places do so because they know an inspector is coming at some point and they will suffer if they do not comply.

But it is harder to hold the vendor liable if all reasonable precautions and amenities are availed by the vendor, and all proper education, but the end of line worker decides to ignore all of it one day.

If someone does something specifically with knowledge that it is likely to cause harm, there should almost certainly be recourse there. Yes.

If they did something that was a standard part of their duty, such as assemble a burrito using certified ingredients to the best practices of the organization, then not so much.

I'll go even further, if the company reacted slowly to recall produce from their shelves after it was discovered that there was contamination, then the company should be held liable for some of the damages that resulted from the delay.

That gets obviously complicated to tease out damages that happened from before discovery. More, to me, I care more about healing the people that were impacted by the contamination as well as possible. If that means that we have to have a cost of business fund to make sure people can be attended to in the event of a disaster, then we should have such a fund.

You can get even more fun, though. Lets say you have a detection system that can reject produce if a threshold is passed on detected contamination. Why would the goal not be for this to fail in a "closed" position to minimize risk of contamination? It could cost more for the company to discard some inventory? Do we expect to have everything hand inspected and always signed off by a person? Even if it can easily be shown that is both more expensive for the company, and more risk of accidental contamination?

We assign fault precisely so that we know who to extract damages from. The burrito assembler is not going to be held liable for bad outcomes when they did everything right.

The mere fact that there are damages to extract means that someone was already damaged, not merely that we want to punish someone. If my neighbor is poisoned by food, I do not have standing to sue in my own capacity because my neighbor was poisoned. At this point, the moral question is whether or not you should be able to extract damages when you can show that you are damaged. Essentially every society has said "yes, of course," even though the specifics of what constitutes damage and recompense differs.

Why do people not universally (or at least generally) tend toward making Fail-Safe systems? I don't know, but they just do not. They must be compelled to.

Call it original sin or prevarication, the second law of thermodynamics, evolutionary inclination to save effort, whatever. But humans just default the opposite way of what you're saying.

You have to remember what "calling to account" is. It is a demand that you explain yourself. In the case of a business venture, it means to present the books and detail the entries. A court, congress, or your boss can demand your presence at a meeting to "explain yourself". Accountability doesn't mean punishment, it means you are subject to demands to make an "account" of your self. Punishment is a separate thing from the account.

If your account implicates yourself in malfeasance, you might be punished. But that's good!. But there are other kinds of accountability. The FAA is very clear that you must make an accounting for yourself. But the FAA is also very clear that they won't punish you for your account. That doesn't mean you aren't accountable!

Most computer systems can not do this! They can not describe the inputs to a decision, the criteria used, the history of policy that led to the current configuration, or the reliability of the data. That's why lawsuits always have to have technical witnesses to do these things. And why the UK Postal scandal was so cruel.

Systems that grant actors immunity from accountability as a matter of policy are terrible systems that produce terrible results. Witness US prosecutorial immunity.

But, in that regard, systems can be made such that they can, in fact, be held accountable? You can design them such that they can list their inputs and why the outputs were set to what they are.

With the speed at which systems operate today, it is actually expected for many systems that they can operate before a person does anything, and that they do so. The world is rife with examples where humans overrode a safety system to their peril. (I can build a small list, if needed.) This doesn't mean we haven't had safety systems mess up. But nor does it mean that we should not make more safety systems.

Yes. Some systems can be made more accountable. They can provide traceability from their inputs to output, provide reflexive access to source code they run, and provide evidentiary traces for reliability.

Safety critical systems that operate faster than human reactions are not accountable. So that's why we never make them responsible. So who is? Same as for bridges that fall down -- the engineers. People forget that civil engineers sign up for accountability that could lead to serious civil or even criminal liability. Which is exactly the point of this aphorism.

Boeing was facing criminal charges, and is currently under a consent decree for exactly this kind of sloppy systems work.

I can agree that there is a lot of lifting for "management decision" on the page, but my point is pretty strictly that it is overstated. I'm largely used to this getting discussed much more generically.

That is, just as I am ok with AES on cars, I am largely ok with the idea that systems can, in fact, be designed in such a way that they could rise to the level of accountability that we would want them to have.

I'm ok with the idea that, at the time of that manual, it was not obvious that systems would grow to have more durable storage than makes sense. But, I'd expect that vehicles and anything with automated systems should have a system log that is available and can be called up for evidence.

And yes, Boeing was facing criminal charges. As they should. I don't think it should be a witch hunt for individuals at Boeing for being the last or first on the line to sign something.

Don't ignore the importance of the phrase "management decision".

When the AES fails to activate because of a bug in the firmware, can you interrogate the machine? No. Can you ask the oem why they hired an intern to write the code and no test plan? No. Can you ask the brake why its design was chosen over others? No. That kind of accountability is not possible in those kinds of systems. And that's why proper engineering is a profession with standards, traceability, and accountability.

If an executive at Boeing directed supervisory staff to falsify logs to maintain throughput, and a traceable failure led to fatalities, I expect that individual to be criminally charged.

Fwiw I agree with you.

I feel that in general people obsess over assigning blame to the detriment of actually correcting the situation.

Take the example of punishing crimes. If we don’t punish theft, we’ll get more theft right? But what do you do when you have harsh penalties for crime, but crime keeps happening? Do you accept crime as immutable, or actually begin to address root causes to try to reduce crime systemically?

Punishment is only one tool in a toolbox for correcting bad behavior. I am dismayed that people are fearful enough of the loss of this single tool as to want to architect our entire society around making sure it is available.

With AI we have a chance to chart a different course. If a machine makes a mistake, the priority can and should be fixing the error in that machine so the same mistake can never happen again. In this way, fixing an AI can be more reliable than trying to punish human beings ever could.

I'm always hesitant to enter "punishing crimes" discussions on this one. Those, by definition, establish intent to commit the crime in a majority of cases. As such, they would almost certainly hit some "accountability" even if they were in a company. Heck, even qualified immunity for government actors typically falls on that.

That said, I do think we are in alignment here. Punitive actions are but a tool. I don't think it should be tossed out. But I also suspect it is one of the lesser effective tools we have.

I disagree. The main point of this line is not about what to do _after_ a mistake (assign blame, punish, etc), but rather about setting up the correct incentives _before_ anything happens so that a mistake is less likely.

When you're accountable you suddenly have skin in the game, so you'll be more careful about whatever you're doing.

Right, I guessed this is what people had in mind. I'll note that this line of thinking typically doesn't get better results. It largely just gets more "red tape" so that you have to get people to sign off on things. And the person that shows up to do something will have all of their red tape in order so that they are not responsible for any damages that result from carrying out their job.

Agreed that personal responsibility is important and people should strive to it more. Disagree that accountability is the same thing, or that you can implement it by policy. Still more strongly disagreed that you should look for a technical solution to what is largely not a technical problem.

This makes sense, effective post-mortems don't focus on assigning blame. They try to identify and fix the problem. The issue with AI is that it's such a black-box right now, this process is likely not feasible. If an AI makes a decision that turns out to be wrong, there's no reliable way to identify and fix the problem. You can prompt engineer or finetune or re-train the model, but in the end you can only hope that issue has been fixed. I think the black-box nature of AI makes it different from other systems we use.

This only works if the party that is wronged and the party doing it are roughly equal in power. For an individual being wronged by eg. Google's algorithms, the path to getting recompense and changing the system is non-existent.

so if someone makes a change to the system… there’s a person somewhere holding themselves accountable for the faults of the system, no?

No, if there are multiple people who in principle are not directly coordinated to make that happen. They can always point the finger at others and say they're not responsible for that bad outcome.

Exactly. And this is a direct consequence of trying to pin things on individuals.

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