3 ms·

I think that a car accident is the wrong example to reason about autonomous cars and their accidents. A better example would be a toaster that starts a fire, in

by yk 10y ago

I think that a car accident is the wrong example to reason about autonomous cars and their accidents. A better example would be a toaster that starts a fire, in that case the important questions are, was the manufacturer negligent and was the owner negligent. If neither, then the insurance company will just regulate the damages and nobody goes to jail. That is also a model that works well for autonomous cars, probably with some kind of licensing of the car and a mandatory insurance. The thing is, we do not need to deter a autonomous vehicle from speeding or driving under the influence, we can directly program it to respect speed limits and not drink.

ghaff 10y ago
>was the manufacturer negligent and was the owner negligent Yes, but in the case of the toaster, it's pretty much the case of some sort of human error on the part of the owner (the cord was damaged, they jammed something in and it got stuck) or it's product liability on the part of the manufacturer. It's an interesting aspect to these sorts of autonomous systems that you can expect to have accidents, even fatal ones, at some rate and that may have to be considered acceptable because "stuff happens" sometimes. There aren't a lot of examples where this is the norm in consumer-facing products. Pharmaceuticals probably come closest.
blablabla123 10y ago
The main thing is the "risk", which in insurance speak means something like probability times costs of bad things happening. For a toaster this is less than 1 cent per year. For a human-driven car that's 1000 $ a year. To be more concrete: the probability that a car owner gets involved in an accident at some point is actually really high. I've already been involved in 2 car accidents, not driving myself though, one of them was very serious. On the other hand I've never heard of someone having a toaster catching fire. And even if it would catch fire, you are probably watching the toaster and can put it out easily - maybe even by throwing the toaster out of the window.

by yk 10y ago

ghaff 10y ago

>was the manufacturer negligent and was the owner negligent Yes, but in the case of the toaster, it's pretty much the case of some sort of human error on the part of the owner (the cord was damaged, they jammed something in and it got stuck) or it's product liability on the part of the manufacturer. It's an interesting aspect to these sorts of autonomous systems that you can expect to have accidents, even fatal ones, at some rate and that may have to be considered acceptable because "stuff happens" sometimes. There aren't a lot of examples where this is the norm in consumer-facing products. Pharmaceuticals probably come closest.

blablabla123 10y ago

The main thing is the "risk", which in insurance speak means something like probability times costs of bad things happening. For a toaster this is less than 1 cent per year. For a human-driven car that's 1000 $ a year. To be more concrete: the probability that a car owner gets involved in an accident at some point is actually really high. I've already been involved in 2 car accidents, not driving myself though, one of them was very serious. On the other hand I've never heard of someone having a toaster catching fire. And even if it would catch fire, you are probably watching the toaster and can put it out easily - maybe even by throwing the toaster out of the window.