I believe the autonomous controls of the car refer to these people, “Superflous meatbags”.
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ONE day in the not too distant future, so the hoary old story goes, airliners will have only two crew members on the flight deck—a pilot and a dog. The pilot’s job will be to feed the dog. The dog’s job will be to bite the pilot if he touches the controls.
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I am a software engineer, and I think we should be on the hook. Until software engineers start taking their responsibility to society seriously, they should be punished under manslaughter laws. When we have a proper licensing system for people writing life critical software, then the punishments on unlicensed life critical software engineering can go up to murder.
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Has a computer virus ever killed a human?
I’ve been trying for years to get an answer to that question.
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I feel like the answer must be yes even if it’s hard to draw a straight line.
Then again, with ransomware attackers going after hospitals, maybe there is a straighter line than I imagine.
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Just wanted to add that I got an autonomous vehicle this month and so far it drives super safe, even if the passengers don’t ride it safely:
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It is technically possible to hijack people’s pacemakers and disrupt critical systems in hospitals with targeted attacks, such exploits have been disclosed in Hacker conferences. Right now i don’t believe there’s evidence such an attack has been done with the express purpose of killing someone but then again if it’s a black ops type of assassination through electronics it’s unlikely we’d know about it.
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Ransomware on a hospital shutting down life support machines comes to mind. I don’t think it killed anyone but came close to doing so.
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Are you asking for a friend? 
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Dangerous kicks; that looks like a rather final fantasy to indulge.
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Man, I can’t believe it took this long for somebody to bring the trolley car problem into this. My first reaction to the headline was to ask how many pedestrians have this very autonomous vehicle to thank for not killing them today. Wouldn’t it be something if that’s the legal argument, that the vehicle was in a situation where it (correctly?) decided that a binary choice existed between killing the one person who died and, say, the three kids who had just darted out from between some parked cars on the other side of the street?
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Well, given that drivers rarely see any liability when it comes to pedestrian deaths…
Yeah, that’s always seemed like a really weird thing to me, and a poor back-up. It’s hard enough for drivers to give their full attention even when they’re solely in control of the vehicle, but it would be impossible to do so if they’re spending almost all their time waiting. When something finally happens that requires split-second reaction, is the human driver waiting for the car to do something (or not) before intervening? By that point it’s too late.
Yeah, the switch from autopilot to manual control in an emergency is actually a huge cause of plane crashes. Many safety experts think the best thing is to have the airplane keep flying and not hand over manual control at all in those situations.
What excites me most about autonomous vehicles is the possibility of cheaper and more efficient public transport.
Pretty sure we hit that milestone a long time ago.
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Yes. It’s just that these are plot devices developed by Asimov to write stories.
And a feasible way to implement them in any sort of real life machinery is just as far away now than it was when Asimov came up with them.
Which is why he came up with another plot device to make them work, the positronic brain, which is most deceidedly not a computer.
The stories are great. Some of them are brilliant and will have their place in the literary canon for ages, because they explore questions about human nature, morals and ethics; stuff that never really gets old.
They are, however, not manuals on how to do robotics.
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When I need one, I’m going to trick it out.
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This is exactly what “move fast and break stuff” sets out to achieve. Another prominent example is data breaches, and also the political system. Break that shit. Look, it says so, right there on the tin.
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Autonomous public transport vehicles would need to be small (single seaters for strangers, mini van for groups) and self cleaning; definitely, self cleaning.
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Well, they wouldn’t need to be - buses and trains work fine autonomously - but they could be.
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Would you honestly want to travel on unstaffed public transport? Certainly here in the UK, they would quickly resemble a slaughterhouse toilet. 
I guess that, instead of having a driver, buses could have a Bouncer with a high pressure water hose.
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This doesn’t have anything to do with public and private assets. The roads have always been public. People have always operated private vehicles on them, for both personal and commercial use.
Feel free to hook your trailer onto any car, as long as you own it or have the owner’s permission, and the vehicles are road-legal. Autopilot doesn’t change any of this.
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Any bets that the emergency human gets stuck with the blame?
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