First pedestrian killed by autonomous vehicle

And you do not have the right to privatize a public asset without consent.

I guess I can just hook my trailer up to the self driving car when I do my cross country trip. And my self driving motorcycle.

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I would presume that Uber is required to have insurance against all accidents whether they are the fault of the driver or computers. So the liability question is really just whether the pedestrian or Uber’s insurance company is on the hook. Just like any other pedestrian collision.

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A proper autonomous system would be talking to other autonomous cars. Swarm AI’s already exist, so if one autonomous car is taking action to avoid an accident it’d be safe to assume all other cars nearby would already be reacting in tandem to minimize additional problems.

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Who is trying to? Unless you’re claiming Uber will be the only one allowed to own self-driving vehicles?

The idea is that once it becomes (true that and) obvious to everyone that self-driving cars are simply better, the state would first ban sales of non-self-driving cars for road use, then later on require that every car on the road must be self-driving. In a more civilized country there could be a non-self-driving-car buyback program to ease the transition, or something.

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Maybe not in all situations, but it enables you to identify loads of problems with your self-driving software that it would never encounter on a closed course, but without endangering anyone. Its an intermediate step between closed course tests and actually allowing your prototype to go out on the road and endanger real human beings.

But naturally none of the Silicon Valley companies engaged in creating skynet building self-driving software have the necessary humility to realize that hey, maybe they shouldn’t be so eager to endanger their fellow human beings with their idiot savant self driving software they’re alpha testing.

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This is obvious to people who are invested in that industry - not to me.

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And until that changes, we live in a democracy. And I hope that until it is obvious to non-industry-insiders (a category which includes me), nothing of the sort happens.

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Also, don’t forget the software engineer(s), designer(s), writer(s)! This is gonna be a labyrinthine legalistic perplex puzzle!

Indeed. And those seeking to profit from this are not always the best people to seek opinions from.

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I still say the best place to roll out self-driving cars is in retirement communities. Low speed limits, well-mapped roads, contained area, high need. And if you’re going to risk cutting anyone’s life short testing a new technology it might as well be someone who didn’t have that long to live anyway.

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Just to clarify: I meant that I am not an industry insider, in any way.

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Watch out for the hot rodding mobility scooters.

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I guess that, if the cars were fitted with some sort of heuristic system, they could each learn from each others’ mistakes; though. I guess, that individual manufacturers would try to keep their swarm separate from other corporations products.

When a robot car kills a bystander, who gets to write the condolence letter? Will there be an “automate condolence letter” word processing function for clippy to generate?

People worried about a hostile AI takeover, are about 150 years too late.

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Sadly, not all of them do.

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I think the safety driver is really a kind of hostage, sort of like the astronauts of apollo. The human is there just to make a statement that if the vehicle crashes and burns, there’s someone there to pay the consequences. The original astronaut corps called it, “spam in a can”.

Of course in this particular instance, it gives Uber a patsy to throw under the bus, and then they can say they’ve taken care of it.

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Cars are inherently dangerous. Cars kill more people than wars. Humans drivers are extremely dangerous. Self driving cars will make driving as safe as possible. In order to eliminate death by cars you must dispose of all cars.

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Real numbers for last year look closer to 4 deaths per week in Arizona for 2017.

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I guess that the next stage after driverless cars is tagging citizens with RFIDs; so that, when faced with an unavoidable accident, the car will be able to scan all potential victims and run a quick Trolley Car Problem to determine who to avoid. Just what info one’s RFID would carry would be the subject of much heated debate, no doubt.

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