The recent airplane crash in Washington and the catastrophic fires in Los Angeles motivate me to share my thoughts on the value in such accidents. In the news the focus is usually first on the fatalities and damage that such events create. That is human. Thinking about the value appears heartless. Bear with me. There is a powerful history of innovation that is propelled by taking such events as teachable moments and learning important lessons. This process is the reason flying is the safest mode of transportation per mile. From an engineering perspective each real accident is a critical test case that the designer of a system did not consider.
The failure of the MCAS system on the Boeing 737 Max is a teachable moment in two important directions. There is a technical angle where a safety-related system was not designed with sufficient redundancy. And then there was a commercial interest where the addition of this complex control system was hidden from pilots to avoid the cost of retraining them. Hundreds of people died because of this corrupt motive.
Learning from mistakes is a sign of intelligence. Individual pain is a powerful motivator. Once a child has touched a hot stove it will learn a lesson for life. Really smart people learn from the mistakes that others make. Compassion is important for society to progress. Compassionate people do not have to feel all the misery of life for themselves to appreciate the suffering of others and work to make life better for everybody.
Thought experiments and simulations in science are powerful tools to expose the weaknesses of systems without the cost of accidents and catastrophes. A proactive mindset is very valuable. Unfortunately, if you are a successful engineer that has worked proactively for all your life you must have learned the following lesson: Upper management often sees no value in the absence of accidents. They can be so removed from the crude engineering realities that they do not even know that a project with a cost of tens of $Millions is at risk to fall into a hole because somewhere down in the margin models there is an assumption that 4x1=1. Ignorance is bliss and makes the big bucks if we are lucky to avoid falling into cracks.
When I as an engineer and a member of the flying public think about the complex system that humans have created so that more than four billion of us can fly with only minor inconvenience every year with very few accidents, the amazing power of proactive engineering and learning from accidents is proven beyond any doubt.
At this point my mind pivots into a loaded question. Don’t you think it is strange that we are now worried about the safety of flying where we had one large accident with sixty-seven fatalities which was the first larger accident since 2001? I am thinking that this is strange when contrasting this to our acceptance of tens of thousands of gun related fatalities every year (48204 in 2022). There is an opportunity here where even reactive engineering could save a lot of lives. If the gun fatalities fell from the sky in two planes every day somebody would do something. Which begs the question: Why is nobody looking into this? There are always discussions if guns kill people, or people kill people. But I think we must look at the system to better understand the root causes of this constant and growing catastrophe. I am thinking about a couple of reasons here that we should appreciate:
1. You might know that there is the “Dickey Amendment” in a federal law that prohibits the use of federal funds to advocate or promote gun control. This chills research on this topic. Personally, I do not think the law is smart when it forbids us to learn from mistakes and accidents.
2. There is also the problem of false equivalencies in the historical context that has the US stuck in a rut on this topic. On October first, 2017, Stephen Paddock, a non-DEI citizen of the United States killed 60 people and injured approximately 867 (at least 413 by gun wounds, others from the panic that ensued) by firing into a crowd of 22,000 concertgoers who were exercising their right to happiness in Las Vegas. He was able to fire over one thousand rifle rounds from assault rifles that he was able to convert to operate like fully automatic machine guns by adding so called bump stocks that were available legally at the time. What did we learn from this catastrophe? Congress sent thoughts and prayers as is customary for such disasters. Our wonderful 45th president banned bump stocks after this shooting. Unfortunately, our less-wonderful Supreme Court declared the bump stock ban illegal on 6/14/2024 in light of the second amendment and the historical context of the constitution.
It is interesting how the conservative justices on the Supreme Court can parse historic words that were written at a specific level of technology to create an equivalence between a front loaded gun, reloading time about 30 seconds for one shot, and a semiautomatic assault rifle that can release 15 to 20 rounds in 15 seconds in semiautomatic mode, and can now legally be converted again to work like a machine gun with a bump stock. To an engineer and hopefully any school child in America it is clear that 1/30 is much smaller than 20/15. Shouldn’t proficiency at basic math be a requirement to get on the Supreme Court? Is the Senate evaluating this in the advice and consent function? Maybe the struggle with basic math explains why some of the Justices have such a hard time accounting for the value of the perks that their benefactors provide to them.
I feel that the justices who are protected by the Federal Marshall service in their cozy chambers are not really connected with the reality that our school children face when they must practice regularly how to deal with the risk of an armed school shooter. One of the suggestions to the victims of a shooting is to rush the shooter and overwhelm him. For a person with just a little imagination and compassion it is obvious that there is a HUGE difference between rushing a guy with a musket that can release one round in 30 seconds vs. the modern semiautomatic rifle that releases more than one round per second for many seconds. In the first case one person might get killed before the attacker is rushed. In the second case the bodies pile up so rapidly that any rush stops dead. Literally.
I am thinking about a thought experiment here: We should offer the Justices a choice between two scenarios:
1. A court chamber that will be attacked by a shooter with a musket, vintage 1787.
2. A court chamber that will be attacked by a shooter with an assault rifle.
In the spirit of entertainment that the people of today enjoy so much we could call this the Supreme Survivor Game and broadcast this on TV.
However, there is no reasonable question here and we can spare the justices to suffer through this experiment. Any sane person will know there is no equivalence.
This raises the question why such a simple question was answered incorrectly from the highest bench in the country without being challenged. There must be a corrupt force in the system that prevents us from learning from catastrophes. Follow the money!
I see a sliver of hope. Our wonderful 47th president has decided that Congress is the opposite of progress. He has entrusted Elon Musk with extraordinary powers to fix the wrongs that the US Constitution 1.0 could not prevent. With Elon’s technological savvy in creating self-driving cars, I am confident that Tesla could create a much safer gun. Imagine what such revolutionary technology could do to TSLA stock! Value and valuation would get much closer to each other. And since the Seconds Amendment afficionados have recently become also afficionados of Musk, I see the opportunity that all the owners of non-equivalent assault weapons will upgrade them to the new, safer Muskets.
The only problem that I see for Elon is that he will not be able to get a trademark on the “Musket”. Our Supreme Court word parsers might find historical equivalency here. And in this case any reasonable person should agree with them.
A smart society learns from accidents and catastrophes. Will AI help us to get on a path to a more perfect Union 2.0?
Or will the corrupting forces that benefit personally from other people’s misery prevail?
Time will tell. Soon.