When companies move fast, they do more than break things
The expression is attributed to Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook, and referred to a culture in which technical excellence turning an idea into executable code quickly was the name of the game.
“Move fast and break things” became the company’s motto, and then the butt of a thousand memes until Zuckerberg, mired in scandal, decided to change it. But that irresponsible approach remains very much the norm in Silicon Valley and throughout the tech industry globally.
The result is that companies put products on the market that are very poorly tested, or that even have problems that have already been identified and are potentially dangerous. In 2020 Uber, locked blindly in a race to get its self-driving cars on the road and start turning a profit, killed a pedestrian. At the wheel of a car plagued with bugs was a safety driver paying no attention to the road. As a result of that accident, Uber halted its self-driving vehicle road tests for six months, and then finally abandoned development in 2020.
Three years on, it seems the lessons have not been learned: GM is recalling its Cruise autonomous cars after an accident in which a woman was run over and dragged along the road for several meters. The company first tried to hide the details of the accident, but an analysis of internal documents…
