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Filligree

> Waymo hits a kid? Ban the tech immediately, obviously it needs more work.

> Waymo hits a kid? Well if it was a human driver the kid might well have been dead rather than bruised.

These can be true at the same time. Waymo is held to a significantly higher standard than human drivers.

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> Waymo is held to a significantly higher standard than human drivers.

They have to be, as a machine can not be held accountable for a decision.

The promise of self-driving cars being safer than human drivers is also kind of the whole selling point of the technology.

What? No? The main selling point is eliminating costs for a human driver (by enabling people to safely do other things from their car, like answering emails or doomscrolling, or via robotaxis).

Sure, but the companies building them are just shoving billions of dollars into their ears so they don't have to answer "who's responsible when it kills someone?"

The question of responsibility, while philosophically interesting wrt. increasingly autonomous machines, is not going to be an issue in practice. We'll end up dealing with it like we always do with multi-party responsibility in complex systems: regulators setting safety standards and outlining types and structures of liabiliy, contracts shifting the liability around, and lots and lots of insurance.

In fact, if you substitute "company providing self-driving solution (integrated software + hardware)" for "company renting out commercial drivers" (or machine operators), then self-driving cars already fit well into existing legal framework. The way I see it, the only change self-driving cars introduce here is that there is no individual operator we could blame for the accident, no specific human we could heavily fine or jail, and then feel good about ourselves because we've issued retributive justice and everything is whole now. Everything else has already long been worked out.

> They have to be, as a machine can not be held accountable for a decision

This logic applies equally to all cars, which are machines. Waymo has its decision makers one more step removed than human drivers. But it’s not a good axiom to base any theory of liability on.

In traditional vehicles, liability is structurally centered on the human driver, and product liability exists but is difficult to assert absent clear or systemic defects.

Autonomous driving systems disrupt this by directly assuming the driving function, forcing liability upstream (where it's significantly more difficult to navigate).

So now it's driver vs injured party. Self-driving makes it trillion dollar company vs injured party. Night and day difference.

> now it's driver vs injured party. Self-driving makes it trillion dollar company vs injured party

It’s historically been my insurance company versus your insurance company or an uninsured driver. (Or I’m Apple Paying you $5k so my fender bender doesn’t show up on insurance.)

Now it’s my insurance company versus the insurance company of a client who can pay damages. The number of cases where drivers are individually litigating is relatively rare and preserved against e.g. Waymo.

yes, so now it's me and my consumer insurance vs an entire department of people at an incredibly well funded company and their corporate insurance company — it's an entirely different scenario that starts looking a lot more like individual litigation for the consumer, even for otherwise run-of-the-mill insurance claims

not to mention that "driver error" becomes an argument with a black box

Waymo is not a machine, it is a corporation, and corporations can, in fact be held accountable for decisions (and, perhaps more to the point, for defects in goods they manufacture, sell, distribute, and/or use to provide services.)

For consumers corporate accountability mostly looks like $5 class action lawsuit checks, it's an entire different weight class compared to individual operator insurance claims

Slowing the adoption of much-safer-than-humans robotaxis, for whatever reason, has a price measured in lives. If you think that the principle you've just stated is worth all those additional dead people, okay; but you should at least be aware of the price.

Failure to acknowledge the existence of tradeoffs tends to lead to people making really lousy trades, in the same way that running around with your eyes closed tends to result in running into walls and tripping over unseen furniture.

But we have no way of knowing whether robotaxis are safer. See, for example, the arguments raised here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-06/are-auton...

We can't blindly trust Waymo's PR releases or apples-to-oranges comparisons. That's why the bar is higher.

You may not have any way of knowing but the rest of society has developed all sorts of systems of knowing. "Scientific method", "Bayesian reasoning", etc. or start with the Greek philosophy classics.

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