Hypothetical

[Robert Edwards]

On Thu, 31 Oct 2002 02:24 pm, 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.

I think that there are many examples of professional engineers being found 
guilty of manslaughter in various disasters. One that comes to mind (I don't 
have the details to hand) is the Coledale Rail disaster of 10 years or so ago 
where a railway embankment above a town called Coledale near Wollongong 
collapsed after a period of heavy rain and the ensuing land slide destroyed 
several houses and killed a number of people. In this case, the N.S.W. State 
Rail engineers who had previously inspected and certified the embankment 
were, as I recall, found guilty of manslaughter and may even have been 
imprisoned.

I believe I studied some cases at University (in the Dark Ages before the Web 
was invented) where engineers designing turbojet and turbofan engines for 
commercial airliners were found guilty of manslaughter when some engines 
catastrophically failed. In this case, I believe there was deliberate 
cover-up of vital information required to rectify the problem.

I think you'll find many other similar cases if you look in the right places.

I seem to recall a text book case for Software Engineering where a software 
failure in a micro-controller controlling an X-Ray machine caused the death 
of several patients and the engineers or similar responsible for the code 
were found to be negligent.

Cheers,

Bob Edwards.