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Comment by ApolloFortyNine | Hacker News Reader

If you hold developers responsible, you can kiss self driving cars goodbye.

What should be passed (but I can't see how) is a percentage of allowed deaths, at least in the early years, and set it to something like 5-10% of the current rate, reducing downwards to 1% after 20 years.

People will die from self driving cars, and undoubtably their will eventually be a case that is 100% the self driving car's fault. The benefit of self driving cars comes from the mistake being permanently fixed, while with human drivers it can be committed over and over again.

There needs to be some kind of protection on the companies (and obviously the developers, I've never heard someone try to say they should be held responsible before) from lawsuits. Otherwise all it'll take a is a small handful beefore companies will just let it die.

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> If you hold developers responsible, you can kiss self driving cars goodbye

Civil engineering and medical device manufacturing seems to be doing fine, despite having similar principles of engineers' liability.

> Civil engineering and medical device manufacturing seems to be doing fine, despite having similar principles of engineers' liability.

The idea that software engineers should be held responsible for something that (as far as we can tell so far) was an accident and not the result of negligence or malice is several orders of magnitude beyond the level of liability that civil engineers and medical device manufacturers have.

> that software engineers should be held responsible for something that (as far as we can tell so far) was an accident and not the result of negligence or malice

Nobody said that. The original comment said developers should be held "accountable for a crime that if committed directly by a person would almost certainly result in jail time" [1].

The standards from medical devices and/or civil engineering, with the associated licensing requirements and verification processes, make sense. Even in the case of a careless mistake or strategic oversight, individuals who could have known but nevertheless signed off should be identified, if not explicitly punished.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jonathanyc

> > that software engineers should be held responsible for something that (as far as we can tell so far) was an accident and not the result of negligence or malice

> Nobody said that.

Well, they quite literally did, because the original comment in this thread was:

> We need to discuss how the developers self-driving cars will be held accountable for the crimes they commit. There is no reason the person who programs or the person who makes money from a self-driving car should be held less accountable for a crime that if committed directly by a person would almost certainly result in jail time. You can’t replace yourself with a computer program and then choose to take only the benefits and not the responsibilities.

I guess you can quibble about the difference between "accountable" and "liable", but that's not a discussion that's particularly interesting to have here, especially given OP's other comments in this thread which make it quite clear that this is what they had in mind.

The quibble in this case would be the meaning of "developers." In the case of a medical device, the developer is considered to be the Manufacturer, not the specific software developers on the team. Considering how often teams change, etc., using the latter definition would be meaningless.

If it was an accident and not the result of negligence or malice, what is the crime for which the developer would be prosecuted?

If the developer was negligent or malicious in their duties, why not prosecute them?

An act doesn’t become okay because two people (the executive and developer) and a robot are now responsible instead of one. What is your justification for the sort of utilitarian calculation you’ve made here? Why do you assume self-driving cars will be safer without any evidence?

If we are going to be arguing from a utilitarian standpoint, suppose we hold the executives of self-driving car companies as responsible as if they were themselves drivers. Then if self-driving cars truly are safer as you optimistically claim, both fewer people will die from accidents involving them and fewer people will go to jail for those same accidents. Seems like a win to me.

> What should be passed (but I can't see how) is a percentage of allowed deaths, at least in the early years, and set it to something like 5-10% of the current rate, reducing downwards to 1% after 20 years.

Whith so few self driving cars that number sold be zero. If you can't assure safety with a few cars whith a human as backup, you should not be in the streets. And it's not the first dangerous accident of an Uber self driving car where Uber was at fault.

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