Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware.
Even if you’re a billionaire.
As the world was gripped this week by the search for the Titan submersible, the tragic saga raised difficult questions about transparency and risk tolerance.
We have heard two narratives. First, that the passengers understood they were taking risks climbing into a 22-foot vessel to dive 13,000 feet into the Atlantic Ocean. Second, that Stockton Rush, the chief executive of deep-sea exploration company OceanGate Expeditions, in a quest for technical advancement, played fast and loose with safety.
Those two narratives are not mutually exclusive. To a certain extent, they are both true. For the story of the five deaths as the Titan imploded — just as some experts had feared and warned — isn’t just a lesson about risk. It’s a lesson about informed risk.
It’s a lesson that applies, to varying degrees, every time we get in a car, board a plane, ride a bike, swim in the ocean, walk down the street at night. It’s a lesson that becomes more relevant each time new technology breaks boundaries: Think autonomous vehicles, space tourism or even generative artificial intelligence.
We understand we’re taking risks. And we can’t be fully informed of those risks. But we should be informed about the knowable risks. Unfortunately, too often the government isn’t or, in the case of a vessel in international waters, can’t be there to protect us.
It’s a lesson of buyer beware. Of trust but verify.
How much the Titan passengers — British billionaire Hamish Harding; French diver Paul-Henry Nargeolet, and Shahzada Dawood, from one of Pakistan’s richest families, and his son Suleman — understood about the risk they were taking will undoubtedly be better known after the investigations, and perhaps litigation, that are likely to follow.
CBS’s David Pogue, who was a passenger on a Titan trip to the Titanic last year, reported that he signed a waiver: “This experimental vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, emotional trauma, or death.”
Harding knew there were risks, the New York Times reports. “If something goes wrong, you are not coming back,” he said in an interview after a dive in 2021.
But how much did passengers, who paid $250,000 for a trip to the ocean bottom, understand about Rush’s recklessness? Did they understand the magnitude of the risk Rush was taking with his life and with theirs? Or the deception?
OceanGate claimed that it partnered with The Boeing Co., the University of Washington and NASA on the design and engineering. All three denied participating in the design or construction, according to the HeraldNet in Everett, Wash., where OceanGate was founded.
Rush dismissed safety concerns raised by his company’s director of marine operations, the New York Times reported. He also ignored a 2018 letter from 38 experts in the submersible craft industry that the company’s safety claims about the Titan were unsupported and that it should test its prototypes under the watch of a certification company.
The Titan was built with a carbon fiber cylinder rather than the industry standard of titanium. U.S. regulations for submersibles that carry passengers did not apply to the Titan because it did not fly an American flag or operate in U.S. waters.
Rush did not want his innovation stifled by regulations. “You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste,” he told CBS’s Pogue.
“I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”
Risk vs. reward is a personal choice. What’s not clear is how much the other Titan passengers understood that Rush was making that choice for them.