Where do you get this "the airplane should never have been invented" from? Nobody has made an argument even remotely like that.
What was said, at the most, was that maybe the Wright brothers should have had to face consequences for endangering that passenger. That maybe they acted recklessly.
I don't think that carrying that particular passenger was the one crucial step towards inventing airplanes.
I'm also only commenting on what the parent wrote to be fair. My point is that being disappointed not to be involved in a death - as that comment suggests - is a level of callousness that goes well beyond accepting the cost of progress.
Since I don't know the man, I prefer to be charitable and am willing to assume he was just being inept in his choice of phrasing rather than assuming he is evil.
I worked on the stab trim gearbox design for the Boeing 757. That gearbox is "flight critical", meaning total failure of it means a crash. I'm very proud that the stab trim system has never caused an accident in the service history of the 757. (Of course, the design was an iteration on the highly successful 747 equivalent, not anything revolutionary.)
Ok, it's fine to make different assumptions about the context. I think you could have made it clearer in your initial response that that's how you saw it.
Yes, what is the difference between a passenger willingly getting on an experimental airplane that subsequently crashed and an entirely unrelated pedestrian mowed down by an Uber SUV as a fully predictable consequence of their trash engineering practices?
Should the airplane have never been invented and the Wrights jailed for trying?