Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

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There is almost always somebody at fault.

With people, yes.

With robots, perhaps not.

If you think of a collision as "someone doing something wrong" (as the police do) then a robot car can't really be responsible for a collision because all it can do is follow its programming. It's literally impossible for it to be 'careless' or 'dangerous' in the same way that a human driver can. Consequently, any accident between two robot cars will always have to share responsibility between the two owners (or possibly the manufacturers, but that's highly unlikely). It'd be exactly the same as if two human-driven cars hit each other in blameless circumstances today - the costs are just divided equally, or each car's insurer pays for the damage to that car, or something.

Robot cars will massively disrupt the insurance industry.

A human driver can certainly can be careless or dangerous, but in my experience this is not how blame is assigned in the case of a collision. It is assigned based a failure to conform to very specific rules of the road - operating left of center (or right, depending on the country), failure to yield, etc. Human factors are taken into consideration, but there is certainly an existing framework for assigning responsibility that appears to be quite compatible with autonomous operators. I would suggest that the shared responsibility case would be the same as it is today - when both operators are in violation.

But for the most part we are not held responsible for our actions on the road, the insurance company are. The obvious penalty for bad driving (banning) is rarely used and requires lots of evidence despite the numerous benefits of eliminating threats from the roads. For the most part collissions are treated more like a social problem than a safety or criminal one. People are "good" or "bad" rather than safe or unsafe. Until unsafe driving becomes socially unacceptable these ideas are just pie in the sky.

I expect it will disrupt the software car industry instead. Insurance companies could buy robot car manufacturers and dictate the logic to follow in case of collision. New standards could emerge, like assigning more blame if one car has an older firmware, which would put pressure on manufacturers to deliver "insurance-friendly" cars first and foremost.

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