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 ...