The purpose I had in mind when I first mentioned the idea was just to provide a convenient way to reason about the law. It lets you re-use laws written with hu

The purpose I had in mind when I first mentioned the idea was just to provide a convenient way to reason about the law. It lets you re-use laws written with human drivers in mind, instead of having to individually recontextualize each as a type of mechanical failure. So you can charge the car with reckless driving, instead of having to show that an algorithmic failure lead to a behavior consistent with reckless driving. It's still an abstraction over something akin to mechanical failure, like how corporate personhood is an abstraction over a group of people. It doesn't mean the algorithm has rights, any more than a fuel injection pump does. You also can't murder a corporation, even though it's a legal person.