@trogdor Completely agree. Mistake, and today it was officially declared as a horrible mistake by a government spokesman. still sad, but at least the investigation can now move forward with a bit less madness surrounding it

@KorvinStarmast it's just weird to me when they don't come out with that kind of information from the start

it's not like they can fool the entire planet watching them

@trogdor People tend to forget fast if the information stays unproven long enough. See Little Green Men and Polite People for a related example.

yeah but then they come out and say it now

"We accidentally shot down a civilian plane" is one of those things where you don't want to jump the gun until you're 110% certain

@trogdor The Galley Crab admitted that Polite People were his soldiers a few years after the incident, and the world's reaction was basically no reaction at that point.

but this is like, days after

not a year XD

People who have the political standing to take responsibility are also the ones who have rather limited visibility into what actually happened, and might have to listen to quite a lot of explanations from their underlings --- who might lie, mislead or engage in seriously wishful thinking to cover their own butts

I suppose that is fair enough

@trogdor It took way longer than a day for any degree of clarity to happen with the MH Boeing. People could hope for that too.

I guess

it just makes them look pretty bad

for the lie

I mean, if the army personnel and contractors in charge of the systems that shot down the plane are like any other system experts I've seen, their first reaction to "Can this bad thing have happened?" is "No, of course not. It's impossible, there are contingencies."

And then they re-learn the lesson they should've internalized in their first programming classes: "yes, your systems can fail including in ways that you never imagined them to".

(ok, this is me assuming it was an automated strike, which I'm not certain of --- but the same kind of defensiveness applies to people too)

yeah

I think it's dumb to have automated systems in charge of things that can kill people but

everyone is doing it

anyway

and no, I'm not afraid of Skynet

I'm afraid of Dumbnet

it's not machine intelligence we have to worry about, it's machine stupidity we have to worry about

and the people putting them in charge of things

and the hacking that is definitely going to happen too

but not the machine intelligence

I kinda want to write an AI apocalypse setting where technology never achieved singularity and took control of the world... we just gave so many choices to algorithms that now the algorithms are independent but not intelligent.

I feel like that is too real XD

it looks to me like where we are possibly headed

The Apocalypse of Things.

@kviiri yeah. jumping the gun on that can really screw up the work of mishap investigators

(see: TWA 800, and all the conspiracy theories floating around about it)

@kviiri "Remember all those case studies you looked at where pretty much this exact thing happened?"

@trogdor I think it's really human stupidity we have to worry about

case in point: the world

@V2Blast I do think the current obsession with automating the very process of thinking is definitely a showcase of human stupidity for sure