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Comment by trollbridge | Hacker News Reader

… assuming the GiantCorp running the robotaxis cares about complying with the law, and doesn’t just pay a fine that means nothing to them.

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The first fines should be meaningless to the company. If the issue isn't fixed the fines should get higher and higher. If the company fixes one issue but there is a second discovered quickly we should assume they don't care about safety and the second issue should have a higher fine than the first even though it is unrelated.

Companies (and people) have an obligation to do the right thing.

What do you mean by "second issue"? A second instance of the same underlying problem, or a different underlying problem? The way you phrase it as unrelated suggests the latter to me.

It's pretty wild to jump straight to "they don't care about safety" here. Building a perfect system without real world testing is impossible, for exactly the same reason it's impossible to write bug-free code on the first try. That's not a suggestion to be lax, just that we need to be realistic about what's achievable if we agree that some form of this technology could be beneficial.

The courts get to decide that. Often it is a "I know it when I see it". The real question is did they do enough to fix all possibly safety issues before this new one happened that was different. If they did "enough" (something I'm not defining!) then they can start over.

>The first fines should be meaningless to the company.

Why?

Fines are completely useless if they are small enough to be considered "the price of doing business".

I agree.

Because 100 million dollars isn't a reasonable fee for a traffic violation.

The goal should be to make them appropriately cautious. Not careless but also not paralyzed by fear. Escalating fines have the property that they are self-tuning. They basically say "go ahead and try it! But if there are issues you have to fix them promptly"

Waymo seems more interested in delivering a true solution than I have seen elsewhere.

the discourse around “corporations” has gotten absolutely ridiculous at this point, especially on this website.

It’s not an unreasonable take given historic behavior. Rather than decrying the cynicism, what steps can we take to ensure companies like Tesla/Waymo/etc are held accountable and incentivized to prioritize safety?

Do we need hasher fines? Give auto regulators as much teeth as the FAA used to have during accident investigations?

Genuinely curious to see how addressing reasonable concerns in these areas can be done.

Why isn't allowing people to sue when they get hurt and general bad PR around safety enough? Did you see what happened to Boeing's stock price after those 737 crashes?

I’d counter that with the Equifax breach that raised thei stock prices when it became clear they weren’t being fined into oblivion. Suing is also generally only a realistic option if you have money for a lawyer.

Right. We have a precedent for how to have an ridiculously safe transportation system: accidents are investigated by the NTSB, and every accident is treated as an opportunity to make sure that particular failure never happens again.

It's ironic given this forum began as a place for aspiring startup (Delaware C-Corp) founders.

Some of us came here because we were finding programming.reddit.com too mainstream (after all this thing was written in Arc! of which almost no-one knew any details for sure, but it was Lisp, so Lisp cool), for sure we weren't visiting this place in order to become millionaires.

Even though I agree, there was a time and a place (I'd say 2008-2010) when this forum was mostly populated by "I want to get rich!" people, maybe that is still the case and they've only learned to hide it better, I wouldn't know.

I feel like crypto has absorbed a lot of the "I want to get rich!", so that instead of posts about "Look at my burrito-as-a-service React app!" it's all "Invest in my Burritocoin!", which all kind of fades into the background like the ad banners our eyes pass over without seeing them.

We feared the advent of LLMs since they could be used as convincing spam tools. Little did we know that humans would often do the same.

I agree, much of the people here are still way too lenient when it comes to big corps.

South Park had a good satire on this sort of generic anti-corporation comment. paraphrasing

"Corporations are bad"

"Why?"

"Because, you know, they act all corporate-y."

https://www.tiktok.com/@plutotvuk/video/7311643257383963937 (sorry googles first result was titktok)

It really has turned into a bitter losers bitch fest in here

Corporations are bad because the diffusion of responsibility and legal liability shield turns them, to a first approximation, into amoral paperclip maximizers that will employ slave labor to save nickels and dimes.

The invariably sociopathic leadership is a symptom, not a cause: they're the least encumbered by ethics, and the best fit for corporate leadership.

The cure is a strong regulatory state.

> a fine that means nothing to them

Yes, this is often the case. In this instance, though, endangering children is just about the worst PR possible. That's strong leverage.

This^^^ -- the impact of positive vs negative PR is unusually huge with this type of tech.

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