Most of the time, just coming to a rapid, controlled stop is the best option. Most drivers don't know how to do that.

Well, we all know that only the government loves us and wants us to be safe. Those money-grubbing capitalists will only make control systems for autonomous cars that are full of bugs.

I say let NHTSA handle the whole thing.

hear hear

I love driving. It is a skill. Still the day will come when my skill level will be unacceptable. A driverless car will be a welcome option.
Driverless cars don't have to be perfect. They just need to be better than humans

What a surprise

I read a pretty good article (and long due) by Ryan Calo at UW called "Robots in American Law". Spoiler: his synopsis ends with
"The article concludes that jurists on the whole possess poor,
increasingly outdated views about robots and hence will not be well
positioned to address the novel challenges they continue to pose."

It's on my cloud drive here: https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/sha... ) and also says it is at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2737598

.. unless you can get enough people together (consensus) to entreat the government to socialize the cost by creating goals and regulations intended to try to approach Perfect Safety..
Then "nobody has to pay for it," right?
I'm sure Bernie would support that... Probably Hillary, too.

I think the lawsuit would attack whoever was responsible for the creation and testing of the "imperfect control system."
As usual.
I love watching as America strives to be the Most Risk-Free Environment On Earth.
And this Driverless Car "debate" is the latest and possibly best example ever.
Enjoy the show.

what really concerns me about "auto" cars is who could "control" your car and it's destination if they decide you are a threat to the powers that be...

the govt is the regulator of auto safety in name only...like all regulators they are in bed with the auto industry and asleep at the wheel...the state is responsible for the design of unsafe roads and very poorly licenses drivers endangering the rest of us...
i have driven cars for over 50 years, flown airplanes for over 40 years, and am yet to be the cause of an accident...90% of what i do is to focus on driving and flying defensively to stay safe...and i am down to one good eye...

"If a reasonably prudent person would have behaved the same way then no liability should apply."

I agree that these incidents properly qualify as "accidents". However, as the studies show, these cases are the distinct minority rather than the majority of incidents. Errors of judgement do not fall within "reasonable prudence".

"you know that you and other drivers violate the law all the time unconsciously."

What actually happens is that people rationalize that certain discretionary adherence to the law is acceptable. Much of driving becomes semi-conscious only because of repetition of prior conscious action (with two daughters having learner's permits, this has become painfully obvious). If someone chooses to accustom themselves to selective obedience to the law, those actions at some point will become the default actions (aka habits) of the future. What they are actually doing, however, is arguing that only outside enforcement of the law makes it applicable, denying the personal responsibility to police and manage one's self. They deny that they own themselves.

"Control system are not perfect and I know that because of my engineering."

Which leads to an interesting question, however: If there is a collision instigated by a driverless car which is determined to be the result of an imperfect control system but still results in injury or death of a person, is that to be simply overlooked as an "accident" (your term) with no liability? I believe that this is precisely the legal issue at hand.

"When an incident occurs" Not necessarily. If a reasonably prudent person would have behaved the same way then no liability should apply.

While you have a point about choosing to violate the law, you know that you and other drivers violate the law all the time unconsciously. Second you are wrong that a machine can follow the law all the time. Control system are not perfect and I know that because of my engineering.

More likely than you think. How will autonomous cars learn to drive amongst Boston drivers, notorious for death-defying activities? In Boston the most audacious driver has the right of way. Or sometimes it's the person with the 1975 Ford pickup with 200 pounds of sheet metal pop-riveted over the rust holes who is the winner. Boston's not for the timid.

Once they have picked up that skill and then travel elsewhere, will automated "Boston driving" spread as an infection throughout the US? I have heard that only Brazilian and French drivers can possibly be worse.

I'm OK. It's the damn car that's intoxicated.

If you read my comment to imply that I advocated that 100% of collisions were avoidable, I retract such and apologize for my poor wording. It seems as if the picture you want to paint, however, depicts the majority of collisions as being unavoidable [accidents] due to "ice, snow, sun, balls, deer, birds etc." A quick search revealed that at least two studies (one by Stanford, another by Indiana) put human error at 90% of all automobile collisions (http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/201....

"It is impossible for any person or machine to constantly follow the law."

Only conscious beings can choose to violate law. Machines always follow the rules. They can do nothing else. You should know that both from your experience as a patent attorney and from Objectivism itself. If they "violate the law", they do so because a human built them as a tool to so do. Would you care to clarify your statement?

"No one has a right to a risk free life. If you drive a car you assume some of the risk of that activity."

I agree, but that does not give other drivers the right to escalate that risk through their inattention or poor decision-making. When an incident occurs, they must be held accountable and face the consequences of their decisions. I can not agree to a position that attempts to disassociate risk and reward (or failure).

this will be punted into the future by lawyers, I bet. -- j
.

That is nonsense. Of course there would be accidents. You are setting up a standard that no one person or machine could ever meet.

It is impossible for any person or machine to constantly follow the law. Everyone blinks their eyes, has to watch multiple things and even a machine could not always follow the rules. For instance, ice, snow, sun, balls, deer, birds etc. will cause accidents and force drivers to not obey the law. It is exactly that sort of thinking that has allowed trial lawyers to create the present legal environment and has caused our insurance rates to skyrocket.

No one has a right to a risk free life. If you drive a car you assume some of the risk of that activity.

Agreed. Milton Friedman gave a great response in support of your argument here (https://youtu.be/VdyKAIhLdNs). His point was that really what comes into play is how much a person is willing to pay to reduce their risk.

The response, of course, is that if everyone is acting prudently, there wouldn't be accidents. If everyone is strictly obeying the laws of the road, the only remaining cause for collision would be equipment failure - a likely assertion in the case of a self-driving car.

I don't disagree with you that our culture has become overly litigious. But I think that the same argument about definition creep can be applied to the word "accident" as well. Many try to pass off collisions caused by lapses in judgement as "accidents" when what has really happened is that the person has significantly raised the risk of a collision through poor decision-making. Do we place responsibility where responsibility lies or attempt to merely pass the incident off as something outside one's control?

Forget knowing that there was a flaw. Companies didnt know asbestos was dangerous at the time, but got socked with damages anyway. Same with Google- if it turns out years later that better technology was invented, I think the lawsuits would reflect that the new technology "would have saved that helpless child....." and the company should have known....

There are entrenched thinkers in any technology area, who resist new ideas simply because they are new, and require change they are afraid they may not be able to adapt to. The U.S. Army resisted smokeless gunpowder on the basis that the riflemen wouldn't be able to hide behind covering black powder smoke, and repeating arms as encouraging waste of ammunition. Lockheed was ready to produce the first jet fighter in 1940, but was turned down because it would require retraining of the entire Army Air Corps maintenance force.

The reality is that the bureaucrats in the DOT who have been thinking in a well-established tradition about automobiles are fearful of their ability to adjust to the changes required for dealing with real "auto" mobile transportation. The same entrenched civil servants have been refusing to permit automated aircraft landings, when the technology to operate autonomously has been built into passenger aircraft for more than a decade. Several serious aircraft crashes in recent years have been as a result of pilots overriding landing systems and causing the incidents.

I'm worried about the "huge lawsuits" as I commented to CG, some neo-luddite jury will ignore long standing liability guidelines and aware a fortune in punitive damages. We treat car accidents far differently from product liability. You can lose control of your vehicle and plow into a car carrying a family and kill them all and there are ways of evaluating the cost -- but if the car company knew there was a flaw in the steering mechanism and didn't fix it, the same accident would generate vastly different outcomes.

Life is not perfectly safe. This is a metaphysical fantasy pushed by demagogues and trial lawyers.

Thats a cool approach. I am not saying it CANT be done, just that its hard and there will be crashes along the way that will result in huge lawsuits and government interference in the "unsafe cars". Eventually it will sort itself out through innovation and hard work. Ultimately it will be safer overall as the cars have more standardized responses to situations and one car can count on another to act in certain ways