What? No, that's silly. Even if the US grants personal rights to corporations (see Hobby Lobby), it's a bit much to imagine any court of law granting rights to

What? No, that's silly. Even if the US grants personal rights to corporations (see Hobby Lobby), it's a bit much to imagine any court of law granting rights to an "autonomous" non-entity created by a third party. Until we develop truly sentient machines, it's preposterous to think that a "thing" could own itself in any meaningful way (even corporations have humans acting on their behalf). Also, what is the incentive to do this? It's far more likely that autonomous cars will be handled like train and bus systems. And finally, as a programmer, any notion of (non-sentient) computer programs being granted autonomy is a nightmare to me. Yes, we can make very nice semi-autonomous toys, but the real world is simply far too complex to expect any machine to be able to handle all of it. This is why we have emergency overrides. Our tolerance for errors made by machines is far lower than our tolerance for errors made by humans, anyway. If a machine autonomously made a mistake that resulted in the loss of human life, it'd be an outrage even if no human could have fared any better under the same circumstances. The liability alone would be a headache.