And yet, drunk people drive and kill themselves and other people every day. We may understand human failure, but we’re still really bad at mitigating it.
Here is where our moral instincts make the difference. When mitigation fails we fallback on taking solace in a mechanism that plays a role in the mitigation aspect but its psychological effect takes a life of its own: punishment.
When a human makes a fatal mistake it bears the responsibility of that mistake and we have protocols to put in place to deal with that (including having somebody to blame and direct our anger against).
When a machine does a mistake it becomes much much unclear against whom direct our anger. The engineers who built it? The corporation that profited from it and could have invested more?
