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Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that you can't viably sell an autonomous vehicle that large, heavy, fast, and operating so close to other vehicles & unprotected pedestrians when it has been deliberately programmed to violate known laws. The makings for an industry-destroying lawsuit are enormous.

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The underlying problem seems to be that the rules of the road are broken. We need to ensure everyone drives to the rules, and if the rules are out of date, they need to be updated. Selectively allowing rules to be broken is an extremely bad precedent.

This. If common behavior is against the rules you either need to change the typical behavior or the rules. You can't just wave your hands and say "but I was following the rules". Sure that might save your wallet if you cause a crash but that doesn't scale to the society level.

I'd argue that it wasn't the person following the rules that "caused a crash" but the person who wasn't.

That works on an individual level but why not modify the rules to fit the norm so the people who exceed the law when practical don't conflict with the people who follow the law reality be damned?

Your comment also reminds me of a proverb to the tune of "bad drivers aren't a problem until they meet".

Sure, one can be that driver that leaves death and destruction in their wake but still look good on paper if the metric is legal and financial penalties since those only loosely correlate with actual bad behavior.

Again, you’re suggesting changing the rules because some people are bad at following them.

Why exactly would they follow the new rules?

Look, if self-driving cars can't drive like a human then it's already game over. Of course it's possible to completely rearchitect our transportation systems to make autonomous transportation possible. Hell, we could install a series of movable tracks along the roads that send signals to vehicles that would remove virtually all of the difficulty. If autonomous vehicles aren't feasible without sweeping changes to traffic law then they're not feasible yet.

Yes this. Humans are free to break laws in that they have free will, robots are not, legally speaking.

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