Regulators urge safety recall of Peloton treadmill after child dies
When my parents were children, everyone heated their houses with an open fire, and if you did something wrong on any day it would kill you. When I was a child, we had a boiler which was perfectly safe so long as you paid someone to service it once a year. Pretty much all the things my parents grew up with had no safety features, pretty much all the things I grew up with did.<p>We have moved to a society where things are expected to be safe except for a number of well known exceptions, and this is good:<p>&quot;It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. &quot; Alfred North Whitehead<p>As technologists it is our business to know and understand the consequences of the mechanisms we build. We value greater understanding and perception. But it is a mistake to project this value system onto society as a whole, since, as the quote shows, the worth of what we build is precisely to allow others to avoid this burden. That applies in safety as much as anything else. As technologists we can see that if a device has a 500W motor in it , it bears thinking about whether there are any safety issues. But consumers rightly expect any safety issues to be pointed out to them.<p>What worries me is when companies are run by people who don&#x27;t understand that all our safety is the result of a lot of work, and so don&#x27;t realise the amount of diligence required.