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Comment by azag0 | Hacker News Reader

Ok, that's financial liability. What about criminal liability? What if the car breaks rules and kills someone. Will the programmers be responsible? The CEO? Can companies be criminally convicted in the US? Or will it be on par with other "machine accidents", where there is typically no criminal responsibility?

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I don't understand this obsession with finding someone to hold responsible for an accident before the accident happens. When an accident with self-driving cars actually happen, if someone is found to have committed a crime, that person will be charged.

If you run a red light and kill someone, it's pretty clear who is responsible though. If a driverless car runs a red light because of a hardware defect, who is? No one? Or do you think there will be a committee trying to establish what exactly went wrong and where? With planes, when autopilot does something stupid, Boeing/Airbus will ground all planes of the same type until they can figure out what the issue is. I can't imagine we will ever hold cars to the same standard as we hold airplanes, that's just impossible.

Sometimes, nobody should be held responsible. It's called an accident.

And if nobody is held responsible, there is no risk for a company to put shoddy software on the street.

At which point they've crossed the line into a crime, so liability is a crime. These concepts are already in play in other industries that use software on devices that could harm or kill.

good luck proving their software is defective

You mean other than, "Your vehicle software is defective and unsafe and therefore banned for public road use by NHTSA as non-conforming to federal safety standards"?

In other words... holding them responsible.

A machine that damages property or causes injury via its own ineptitude is defective, not accidental. Hitting a deer that jumps out from roadside cover is an accident. Plowing over a bicyclist in a well lit environment isn't. There is going to be a lot of the latter with self driving cars.

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.

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.

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