7 ms·

We already have a framework in place to deal with this. If your car's brakes fail and you run the red light because you had no way to stop, you are not at faul

We already have a framework in place to deal with this. If your car's brakes fail and you run the red light because you had no way to stop, you are not at fault. Neither is the engineer that developed the braking system, unless they were criminally negligent. If the software that runs the red light fails and gives everyone a green light and you run it and get in an accident, you are not at fault, and the person who wrote the code will not be going to jail, again unless they are found to be criminally negligent, or malicious. If a systemic fault is found at any point, a recall will be done to remedy it. This isn't some new class of problem here, this is the same old thing we have been dealing with for many years. You already rely on many many people doing their job correctly every day to not die, this is no different.

notahacker 9y ago
If your car's brakes fail, it's probably a mechanical fault due to natural wear and tear, for which it is easy to avoid assigning blame. If a car's autonomous capability spectacularly fails, it's far more likely to be due to a bug at design stage. Many of these bugs are likely to cause vehicles to behave in ways human drivers would certainly be prosecuted for, and we really haven't got a whole lot of precedent for auditing responsibility for bugs in complex software performing varied life-threatening interactions with other humans which replicates tasks humans themselves perform imperfectly and are frequently prosecuted for negligence over. It would be a strange system which punishes humans for individual serious driving flaws but merely requires them to remedy it for introducing systematic serious driving flaws.