Blame Your Mistakes on Technology 419
Techdirt has an quick look at how it is becoming much more common for people to blame their mistakes on technology. "There are people driving off cliffs and through flooded roads and taking detours that span half of England, apparently at the behest of their navigation units. Things got so bad in one place that authorities even had to put up "ignore your sat nav" signs. Now, a woman's car got hit by a train, and for some reason, she's blaming a GPS navigation unit."
personal responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
they are just idiots... (Score:3, Insightful)
Common Sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Blame (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, that sounds about right (Score:3, Insightful)
That being said, I still won't ever get directions the old way ever again (unless they build a new city somewhere or something and I don't have the maps for it).
Just more whining? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, the moral of the story is that we have an innate ability to shift blame. No "technology" is required. (Or rather, maybe blame shifting is a technology.)
poorly marked railroad crossing (Score:2, Insightful)
Unthinking obedience to the technical gizmo (Score:5, Insightful)
Her BMW had an "intelligent" system on-board as well as the GPS, and out of nowhere, it told her to "stop the car". So she did. Quickly. In the fast-lane, on the motorway. Chaos ensued.
She's not unintelligent (though, being blonde, she did get a certain amount of follicle-related humour directed at her), but she did as she was told, in a pressure-situation. She's one of those people who don't interact well with machines or computers. She didn't think it through, she just reacted. In fact there *was* something seriously wrong with the engine, but nothing that would prevent her from pulling onto the hard-shoulder (the emergency lane).
There seems to be a tech-friendly "gene" (though whether it's nature or nurture is up for debate) whereby people either abrogate all responsibilty to the machine, or they treat it as an advisory adjunct to their daily lives. Perhaps it's just the growing pains of a society in the midst of rapid change. Perhaps in a couple of decades, when the holistic neural interface(TM) is commonplace, it'll be us "techno-savvy" yesterday's-(wo)men that people will be laughing and pointing fingers at, Nelson-like. I wonder what it'll feel like, when the boot is on the other foot...
In other words, sure, people do stupid things, but this is an opportunity to educate, not to mock.
Simon.
Re:Common Sense (Score:5, Insightful)
New Excuse, old problems... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, that sounds about right (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unthinking obedience to the technical gizmo (Score:1, Insightful)
Blame it on the rain, blame it on the weatherman.. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's actually quite common, and I think it has to do with the way many people are brought up. And it translates into our everyday life and actually corporate life.
In many companies, it does not matter when anything goes wrong, as long as you got someone else to blame. It's funny. Should you happen to work in a large company and something goes wrong, take a close look around you. The only person or people who get(s) very nervous, no matter how trivial or bancrupcy-threatening it is, is the one who can't find anything or anyone to blame but himself.
That's how our education and business system works. It starts with the homework-eating dog and doesn't even end at the report-shredding Xerox. It's never you. It's someone else or, and that's more comfortable, something. Something is better than someone, because something rarely objects.
And technology is better than pets. First of all, the pet excuse gets old. And second, and that's more important, many people don't have the foggiest idea just what computers or gadgets can do. They will readily believe you. Not to mention that some things might have even happened to themselves already. Your report's not ready in time? Sorry, boss, computer BSODed on me, JUST before I could save.
He'll understand. Take my word for it.
A friend's daughter... (Score:5, Insightful)
After crying a lot... she yelled: "TUPID CHAIR!" and kicked the chair.
Somehow by reading the article summary this scene came to my mind.
Re:Blame (Score:5, Insightful)
Trigger lock? There's a key, somewhere around here... (there's actually a whole host of issues around these keys: five year olds understand locks and keys, so either they're with you or they're available to the kids.) I earnestly hope I don't have to figure out how to silently remove a trigger lock in the dark while an intruder is in the hall between me and my children.
Magic ring that enables the electronic trigger? Hope the battery didn't die (in the ring and/or in the gun), hope the gunpowder residue and the cleaning fluid from the last time I was at the range didn't corrode or short out the circuitry. Hope the electronic components are able to handle the shock of firing the gun as durably as a mechanical trigger (unlikely, but possible).
Personally, I like gun safes and pistol vaults. The pistol vault I like the best is the one with the touch combination that with a little practice, is very simple to get right, even in the dark, even under stress. Still an extra step, but it's a mighty small obstacle to me and a much bigger obstacle to the kids or to a thief (assuming I installed the pistol vault correctly and they can't just take the whole thing).
Back to the point: there's nothing the gun manufacturer can do to the gun to make it harder for someone else to shoot that doesn't also make it less reliable or less available to me. But there are ways for gun owners to responsibly keep firearms, which leads the discussion to where the responsibility really lies: with the gun owner. If a kid takes one of my guns and accidentally kills another kid, I'm going to feel responsible for the tragedy. So I do what I can to minimize the chances of that happening while still keeping responsibility for my own self defense. And IMHO, that's how it should be.
Regards,
Ross
Better technology than servants! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The trouble with your argument is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Common Sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Common Tech Support Nightmares (Score:2, Insightful)
Right - and the person/company that writes software stupid enough to include such routes bears none of blame? Bovine exhaust. I know it's popular on Slashdot to blame the sheeple - but this isn't a case of using a hair dryer in the shower. It's a case of poorly designed and implemented software. These navigation units market themselves not as providing 'suggestions' but as providing 'directions'. Failing to supply what is advertised is the direct fault of the developer and manufacturer.
This has nothing to do with the GPS being 'off by a bit' - to direct someone down an unmarked dirt road takes a little more than that.
Re:Unthinking obedience to the technical gizmo (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not gene, it's a results of having to take a decision in a stress situation. And the stress was caused by her nto being experienced what "stop the car" might mean and how she should react.
If this happens to her again 3-4 more times, she won't likely stop the car on the middle of the road. Did she "lose a gene"? Because if this is so, you may win a Nobel prize.
Also thew GPS is slightly to blame in this one case (unlike the "jump off the cliff" and "hit by a train" cases). The voice should've said "please pull the car aside, there might be an engine problem". "stop the car" causes stress and is not the right action never mind what.
Re:The trouble with your argument is (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, the law (unfortunately) does not punish stupidity. But I'm firmly against getting even worse and rewarding it. It was dumb to put the mug there, so you got the coffee on you. That the coffee was searing hot must have been obvious to her, because I do know the McD cups well, it's not really known for its perfect insulating properties. In other words, if you fill something HOT into them, you KNOW instantly when you TOUCH them!
When you now go ahead and put that so effing HOT cup right between your legs and hit the throttle, you act just plain and simply stupidly. Even if you don't have the foggiest idea what coffee is, you should know, at least that's what I expect from people who want to operate potentially lethal machines like a car, that a liquid in a not sealed container which is frigging HOT will follow the laws of gravity and drag. And thus WILL spill when exposed to relevant force.
Off Topic (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unthinking obedience to the technical gizmo (Score:3, Insightful)
Strongly disagree. If she was so keyed up and stressed out so as to unthinkingly obey any instruction issued out of a machine on the dashboard, then she probably shouldn't have been driving. Certainly she shouldn't have been speeding well in excess of the limit, in the fast lane, on an unfamiliar motorway, on a route she'd never taken before.
She put herself in a situation where she made an error of judgment. That's not the machine's fault, it's her fault for not having the foresight to avoid the situation.
She was sitting at the controls of the car. Barring mechanical failure of the car to obey her controls, she's responsible for everything that it does, and that responsibility extends to judging whether she's fit to operate it or not.
(Now, there's a separate issue here, which is whether the possible collision which might come as a result of coming to a dead stop in the fast lane of a motorway would be the fault of the driver stopping, or of the driver following so closely as to be unable to stop their vehicle before it collided with the stopped one; that's a slightly more complex area and might be argued either way, although I suspect it would be on her for stopping unnecessarily.)
Blaming a GPS unit for a car crash is right up there with blaming the beers you just drank for crashing when you were drunk -- it may in some technical sense be true that it caused the accident, but the buck stops with you for putting yourself in a situation where you were adversely affected. Abrogating personal responsibility in favor of blaming inanimate objects (or chemicals, or atmospheric/weather phenomena, or whatever) is dangerous -- the responsibility always ultimately rests with the human being sitting at the controls, to either be safe, or to not enter into a situation that's outside their capacity for dealing with it. Not knowing your own limits isn't an excuse.
Just technology? (Score:4, Insightful)
Naw. People blame being wrong (or STUPID) on *anything*. Technology is just handy. Take it away, and they'll blame it on something else.
Take one dude I know. He started accusing people of hiding his smokes because he couldn't find them. When everyone told him "Nobody hid your smokes, man.", he got pissed, through a tantrum, and said "Well, I guess that God must not want me to smoke, because HE must have hid my cigarettes!"
That was while he was sober. You should have seen him on the sauce.
[insert deity] help you, if you come to my house (Score:3, Insightful)
THIRD DEGREE BURNS oughtn't be the issue. Did you know that if you put your hand into a fully-operational blender, your hands will turn into LIQUIDISED FLESH. It's such an unbelievably stupid act that no-one would have much sympathy for you though. As no-one has much sympathy for the woman who puts not-even-boiling-hot coffee between her thighs and (get this!) does so while she's driving.
- From an earlier post on Digg -
I'm sorry, I guess I'm just sick of this "defence" of stupidity, in the case of the McDonald's coffee case.
Coffee is *made* with boiling-hot water. It is *supposed* to be scalding-hot. I don't care whether it's plus or minus a few degrees of the average scalding-hot water that coffee is usually made with - that shouldn't be the issue, it'll still hurt like hell. The issue ought to be "did the defendent do something unbelievably stupid or was the company negligent". The answer is that *yes*, she did something stupid; she put a frail paper-cup of scalding-hot water between her thighs and then (presumably involuntarily) squeezed her legs together.
Yes, she was hurt, badly. Yes, McDonalds could have made the coffee at a lower temperature, and they were making it hotter for commercial reasons. Both of those are true and neither ought to be relevant. The decision ought to have been based on whether what she did was a reasonable thing to do with *any* fresh cup of coffee - basically whether she should have expected to have been able to pour said cup of coffee over her without injury. I invite anyone defending her to make *themselves* a cup of coffee and pour it over their thighs (at your own risk, of course) - it'll scald you just as badly.
That is in fact what the McDonalds lawyer ought to have done. Simply made a fresh cup of coffee in the court, and asked for volunteers (judge, jury if it was a jury trial ?) to have scalding-hot coffee poured over them. Anyone defending her case would presumably consider *normal* scalding-hot coffee to be non-injurious to human skin.
McDonalds only have a "reasonable" burden of care - if the coffee-cup had dissolved and the contents scalded her, I think we'd all be behind her, but it didn't. People have too little sense of personal responsibility these days, it's easier to sue and "donate" the blame to someone else. It's a sad day for society in general when gross stupidity is defended against common sense.
None of this means I don't feel sorry for her, by the way - I do. I just also think it was her fault, and given that she's become the poster-child for incongruous lawsuits, I think a lot of other people feel the same way. I also think it's a travesty when the courts are overflowing with cases, and innocent people rot in jail awaiting their trial while stupid things like this waste court time; I think there'd be a lot less cases like this if the loser-pays-costs model was adopted, as in the UK, but that's another issue.
Simon.
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
When you have sat-nav, or point-to-point directions, you're SOL if you make a mistake or things aren't clear. If you have a MAP and some basic skills you can always know "i'm here, and i need to be there, so I need to generally be going X direction."
Ugg and Ogg just had less opportunity (Score:3, Insightful)
Now you can blame electricity, computers, and needing to meet deadlines for international customers. You can roll out a new excuse every day and never get to the end.
Re:personal responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case the percieved authority is a little electronic box.
Re:[insert deity] help you, if you come to my hous (Score:2, Insightful)
How deliciously ironic...
Anyways, coffee has been used for over a thounsand years. Coffee makers and electricity have not.
Re:Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oregon Road-less areas listed as highways (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe I'm just cynical, but that's probably how they got into such trouble.
People are stupid.
People's instincts will win a Darwin Award.
Common sense, isn't.
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Re:Go right ahead and blame the technology! (Score:3, Insightful)
(Hint: look at the color of her hands. If there's any makeup left in the barrel, she should put some on there, too!)
Haven't we all... (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing is that people are stupid enough to follow such directions, another is that the map technology clearly isn't up to par. Imagine a car with 'auto-drive' that blindly follows directions just like people do, but without the little bit of sanity that made those ambulance drivers stop after 200 miles and realize that they were a bit off course... A computerized driver would just have kept on going, possibly attempting to reach the goal going 'the other way', i.e. around the globe, which includes a fair amount of undersea driving...