Fight Club - The Recall Coordinator's Formula

No, that comment sounds like the insurance job described in Fight Club[1] > Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one. [1] Video link: [VIDEO]

If you think about this, this too is just an economic motive. The cost of non-compliance (fines, prosecution, etc) multiplied by the risk of that happening is less than the cost of compliance, so it happens. People and companies break laws all the time when it's cheaper to do so. I can't help but think of Fight Club [1]. [1]: [VIDEO]

[VIDEO] The economic benefit exceeds the human loss of life. Of course no economist SAYS that because one of the big lies economics runs away from is that the value/cost of a random human death is about the same as the value of, say, paving over a swamp estuary or, say, the ocean becoming acidic to the point we lose photoplankton and will kill off all aerobic creatures in the world. If economics can't properly value something that doesn't impact the budget/spreadsheet within a couple months, it pretends it doesn't exist and has zero cost. Heck, proper economics will happily assign negative value to humans. Old? Sick? Debilitated? It's GOOD that person died! But economists don't talk about those things, and don't even study them, well, not publicly. Because it would destroy economics as a serious discipline.

I'm reminded of the delightful opening scene of "Fight Club" where the narrator explains that his job is to apply "The Formula". [VIDEO]

It's kinda insane that they can't do a "undo last commit; git push; tell the CI/CD to push a new OS release" procedure. But there's a probably Fight-Club-esque math (1) there that make it "If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.". Congrats Google, your procedures have made you an overweight gorilla that isn't agile enough... (1) [VIDEO]

>Other manufacturers treat defects in their products by doing a recall and wearing the costs of their mistake. No. Other manufacturers treat defects with recalls after analyzing the fiscal prospect of doing so, and determining whether or not state/regional laws require them to do it. Here's one of the "not that wrong" scenes from Fight Club to better explain[0]. [0]: [VIDEO]

> Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply it by the probable rate of failure, B, then multiply it by the result of the average out of court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one. [VIDEO]

None of this is true. A company left to their own devices will optimize for maximum profit at the cost of literally everything else. Every cost of their business that's possible to externalize will be externalized. Every corner will be cut in the name of marginally better profits. For example, you say lawsuits are costly. To a company, that's meaningless. The only question is, is the cost of a lawsuit greater than the money saved cutting corners? If not, it's better to kill people and deal with the lawsuits: [1]. Moreover, companies are still run by people, and people have biases. Most notable of which is the short-term thinking bias that results in companies irrationally optimizing for short-term gains, compromising long-term ones. And what fits perfectly into that trap? Yep, safety. Do you know how much money you could save by delaying maintenance? Lots, lots of money to be had right now vs a nebulous concept of potentially higher chance of an accident at some uncertain point in the future. The monkey with its primitive brain chooses the immediate reward every time. [1]: [VIDEO]

[VIDEO] Not sure you understand how "The Formula" works. The profit generated by adding this feature will outweigh the cost of any resulting accidents that they take liability for. A less pessimistic way of phrasing it is that within the boundaries they've defined, their self driving system is so much better than a human that they're willing to assume responsibility for crashes deemed "at-fault" while using the system. Not intentionally trying to compare that with other automakers, but Mercedes is the only "you can buy now" vehicle (ignoring robotaxis/Waymo/others) that assumes liability with those capabilities. Until other automakers provide that legal guarantee, they're parlor tricks at best that will continue to get folks killed in scenarios that they otherwise wouldn't had they been actually paying attention.