Look at the road today.  There are still lots and lots of cars from the 90s out there, and a good number from the 80s.  With the improvements in rust proofing and paint that were made in the 90s, in addition to better manufacturing of engines and transmissions, those 90s cars are likely to be around for many years still.

I am a huge fan of this technology. Where I live, there are a ton of older people on the road who should not be driving, and these robot cars are a game changer – I would prefer to be driving behind a robot car than an elderly person with poor vision and poor reflexes. I think the roads will be a million times safer when we all have robot cars. 

Many years ago when the DC Metro system was launched, it had driverless trains. There was such an outcry about it that they had to add drivers into the system. I am worried that when the Google cars go to market, there will be a similar backlash, totally undermining all the benefits of automating cars.

The reality is that even if a robotic car makes the wrong choice and kills people, that’s regrettable, but it’s almost impossible to argue that robotic cars won’t save far more lives than they will cost. The average driver is so bad that it’s just going to be better. Heck, it already is. I read earlier this week that Googles cars have now amassed hundreds of thousands of miles and have been involved with exactly one accident, which was deemed to be completely the fault of the other (human) driver.

You just have to hope the oncoming lane is empty for you to swerve into…

Let’s say there is no criminal statute breached, then we’re on to civil liability.  Again, the most likely head of damages is negligence – your action or failure to act caused my injury in a way you could have reasonably avoided.  But again you would have to prove negligence on the part of the programmers, the car, the driver, the bus, or some combination thereof.

I think it’s entirely possible that most accidents which occur might not meet either a criminal or civil standard, leaving no one at fault for the accident.  Good legislation could cure what ambiguity exists – we can readily imagine a social compact in the form of laws which essentially remove liability unless manifest negligence is found.  We already accept that people are injured and die despite the best intentions of the engineers behind other safety mechanism like air bags, so it’s really not that far a stretch to say that autonomous automobiles are themselves akin to this – a very remote risk of injury or death is simply part of the system we accept.

Finally, there are plenty of areas (depending on which jurisdiction you live in) where we accept injury or death without either criminal or civil penalty, e.g. law enforcement, standard error rates in surgeries, etc.  I think we can solve this if the public and political will is there to create the right legal environment, assuming of course the tech is really that foolproof.

TL;DR: morals and ethics aside, only the criminal and civil law will really matter, which is a solvable problem by legislatures.  The barrier is social and political will to a legal problem, not an ethical one.

This is akin to saying that the auto-pilot systems used in airliners need to make moral decisions when a bird approaches their jet engines.

As far as legal issues go, don’t many US states already have the concept of ‘no fault’ accidents? [after wiki research: no, only 12 do, and usually only for minor accidents. But these are probably the majority.] These systems basically say, ‘each insurance company covers its own client; no one even bothers trying to determine responsibility’. Probably driver-less car accidents could be handled by an evolutionary (not a revolutionary) expansion of no-fault insurance law. Some cases would come down to actual owner negligence (e.g., not maintaining brakes) or manufacturer defect (stuck accelerator pedals) but these would be edge cases.

Maybe I’m too optimistic, but thankfully this is not going to be an overnight transformation.

The reason this will never happen is because the first time there’s an accident, the software company gets sued into oblivion.  The lawyers would never let this proposal come to market.  In fact, driverless cars are very unlikely for the same reason.  They need a driver to blame.

Interesting that this strain of robotics is getting ethical thinking, while army bots get more and more killy. 

No, no, no. 

It’s _not_ okay to kill Hitler. That would be time tampering and could get you committed to a Federation penal colony for a very, very, long time. 

Instead, we’ll see cars using information from the environment and data from neighboring vehicles, and use a dumb local strategy to avoid hitting things. We can discuss emergent phenomena from that, such as an overall reduction in accidents, but ethical reasoning is not among those phenomena. Think bees protecting the hive, not soldiers protecting a fortress.

Now, it is plausible, without strong AI, for driverless cars to execute non-local strategies, but those decisions would have been made in advance by engineers. Cars would have to coordinate their information, consult a massive and detailed database of no-win scenarios, and execute predetermined strategies based on the ethical choices of the engineers. And since Google will not always hold a monopoly on driverless cars, that database would have to be a cooperative, standardized effort by all manufacturers. Technically, this is possible. Practically, it seems pretty far-fetched.