> But pragmatically, they likely don't answer the phone. Or email.
> So, it is still easier to
... hold them responsible in court for damage/injury/deaths caused by the actions their vehicles take which are not under control of the driver.
> So, it is still easier to
... hold them responsible in court for damage/injury/deaths caused by the actions their vehicles take which are not under control of the driver.
If your corporation (via it's self driving software) kills someone, the corporation will "go to jail", a C level exec does the jailtime and the entire company will be unable to carry on any of it's normal business for the duration of the sentence (while still being held responsible for it's obligations to staff/suppliers/cerditors). If that self driving software is judged to be liable for a traffic infringement, the corporation will pay an amount equal to the percentage of income that a human driver would have paid. If it's an infringement with a ~$400 fine, the corporation should pay ~0.5% of their annual income - the same sort of penalty as "an average salary" person.
A couple of $20mil fines and a 6 month total company shutdown would be very "proactive" in encouraging Tesla to get Elon to shut the fuck up with his big bold claims that cannot be backed up. If Uber had been slapped with the "corporate personhood" equivalent of whatever penalty a human driver who'd killed that person crossing the road with a bicycle they'd be far more circumspect about using minimum wage contractors as "safety drivers" in their prototypes.
(I can dream, right?)
I can see a wide spectrum between my (admittedly over punitive towards corporations) ideas and this (somewhat intentional misinterpreted) idea of yours. But I do honestly think Uber and Tesla have evaded morally deserved punishments by blaming customers or contract staff who were pretty much doing what everybody would expect to be able to do using the technology as described.
"it's inevitable that even a responsible _person_ will screw something up" - but that doesn't mean we give them a zero consequence break if they kill or injure someone. (We do, however, distinguish between things like murder, manslaughter, and negligence-causing-death. And penalise differently, based at least partly on the ability of the punishment to discourage other people from doing similar things. Perhaps Uber was only guilty of negligence-causing-death for using minimum wage contractors as safety drivers. Perhaps Tesla was guilty of manslaughter by advertising as "autopilot" a thing that drives full speed into offramp dividers?)