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The biggest issue for the wide deployment of autonomous cars is the legal liability for stuff like this, where it’s obvious that a human was unlikely to make th
by drob518 10mo ago
The biggest issue for the wide deployment of autonomous cars is the legal liability for stuff like this, where it’s obvious that a human was unlikely to make this mistake. The robot can make human mistakes, but it can’t make robot mistakes.
- bryanlarsen 10mo agoIf a human kills or seriously injures somebody with a car, the insurance company will pay out 6 or 7 figures. If Waymo et al can successfully limit payouts to that, they'll be fine. OTOH, if every death or serious injury comes with a 9 figure+ punitive damage award, they'll be in trouble.
- drob518 10mo agoExactly. The bots are probably saving lives at this point just being more reliable than humans on the basics, but if they make mistakes that lead to outsized payouts, then the market won’t be insurable and will fail for legal reasons, not for technical reasons. I suspect we’ll figure it out in the long run because it’s worth it to do so, but the short run might be pretty rocky.
- supertrope 10mo agoMany state minimum insurance limits are laughably low. Like $30,000.
- potato3732842 10mo agoGood. Auto insurance suffers from the same cost spiraling principal-agent problems as healthcare. I think states that nudge but don't completely require insurance have it right (I live near one of them). Even though most people have insurance the plausible threat of having to actually litigate against someone and attempt to collect seems to put huge downward pressure on everything saving even the insured people a ton of money more than offsetting the "risk" of sharing a state with uninsured people. Having laughably low minimums is the next best thing.