Hypothetical

[Daniel Smith]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 01:24:34PM +1000 or thereabouts, Jeremy wrote:
> Regarding the current thread about spilling coffee on oneself due to ones poor
> coding abilities, there is a mildly interesting hypothetical here:
> 
> http://onlineethics.org/cases/robot/robot.html
> 
> Interesting if you have nothing else to do at lunch, that is.
> 
> I found it while I was bouncing around the web trying to find any instance of
> an engineer taking responsibility for a disaster.  The count so far:  0.

Wow, even the Tacoma Narrows Bridge?

Quick googling reveals this
http://www.failuremag.com/arch_science_tacomanarrows.html

which confirmed my gut feeling. Disasters occur because of budgetary
constraints, politics and stupidity. Engineers would have never designed
a multi-section shuttle booster, but Congress awarding the contract to
maximise pork required the O-ring compromise. Followed by a launch in
dodgy conditions to make a politician happy.

Engineering is applied science. Usually this means when a disaster
occurs engineers are more concerned with failure analysis (and process
improvement) than finger-pointing. Another reason "Engineers are from
Pluto and Management are from Uranu^W ummm. another planet entirely."
Yeah that's it. ;-)

Daniel