Rules for Driverless Cars

In 1899, the first pedestrian was killed by a car in the US. It sparked off a debate: was this to be treated as murder? That seemed too harsh given that the driver had no intention to kill. But calling it an accident felt… too minor. There were no clear rules about all this back then.

Are we at the same junction today wrt driverless cars, asks this Secret History of the Future podcast. When the first pedestrian was killed by a driverless car, questions for which no clear rules existed began to come up. Was it the pedestrian’s fault since she didn’t look where she was going? Or was it the fault of the human driver, the one who is expected to be alert and override the system? Or is it just too unreasonable to expect a human to stay alert behind the wheel when he doesn’t need to do anything most of the time in a driverless car? Or should we blame the software? In fact, the logs indicated that the car had detected something on the road 6 seconds before impact, but it couldn’t make out what that something was.

There are those who say road rules need to change keeping driverless cars in mind. Remember those touchy-feely rules like the Yield sign? They’re just too ambiguous, not suited for being coded into algorithms. Perhaps they need to go and be replaced by unambiguous rules, ones that can be coded in. If that approach is adopted, liability would be clear: if the rule was violated, it’s the car manufacturer’s fault. But if the rule itself was unclear, then the rules need to change.

Or perhaps we’ll end up adjusting the rules of the road to become more and more driverless car-friendly. After all, that’s how the laws against jaywalking started: make it illegal to walk on the road, and you reduce the odds of cars hitting pedestrians. (The side-effect was that over time, we began to believe that roads are meant for vehicles, not humans). Will we end up creating similar laws for driverless cars going forward?

The answer to that lies in where the balance of power lies. At least in the West, that lies with the automobile industry which is big, better organized and richer that the average group of citizens. Plus, many of those citizens are highly enamored by new technology in general.

So I guess that’s where the world is headed.

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