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Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this. If there are 1/20th the amount of deaths, how is that going to sink self driving cars?

Most drivers on the road are effectively being subsidized by bankruptcy protection, because most cannot possibly cover the liability they are exposing themselves to by driving. This "subsidy" is far less valuable to a self driving car manufacturer than individual drivers.

Well not if they have insurance.

I mean, sure, you can come up with some scenario where the liability exceeded the insurance coverage, but I haven't heard of many of those. Anyway, it comes from somewhere. If bankruptcy protects drivers, it also exposes them to the risk that they will suffer damage that isn't compensated.

Regardless, expecting a legal loophole to preserve the status quo indefinitely seems quite unrealistic and inherently unstable. If that actually holds up something that could massively benefit society (both economically and in saving lives), we simply legislate liability limits.

> we simply legislate liability limits.

Liability you can incur while driving is almost arbitrarily high. Individual drivers rely on the existence of bankruptcy protection to cover these rare scenarios, or simply don't think about or plan for this at all.

> but I haven't heard of many of those.

How many do you think it takes to put a self driving car manufacturer out of business?

I'm not saying the status quo is a great situation, or that this is a good or bad argument for or against self driving cars. Only that it's a description of the current situation, and why legal issues might be a much bigger problem for self driving car manufacturers than individual drivers.

Because the deaths will be network level effects that a person would be helpless to mitigate through behavior. There's no sense of being a careful or responsible driver with a self-driving car; its all whether or not the algorithm or software is correct.

It's a different type of potential error and a much more scary one. I can mitigate human drivers as a pedestrian by taking care walking, but I cannot mitigate an AI that thinks my shirt makes me look invisible due to its learning being deceived by a pattern.

Because a jury will hand out a huge multi-million dollar award against a self-driving car company when its car crashes causing a death, while when a human causes a death it is usually just an "accident" or a much smaller settlement based on the person's insurance coverage.

Because the autonomous car is a systematic issue that could affect every single car on the road using that manufacturer's software, and the "driver" of the car has no way to stop or mitigate the risk, or cause risk. He puts his life in the company's hands each time he drives the vehicle.

I'm not sure why people even embrace self-driving cars. By now we know that centralization, lack of maintenance, and fragmentation in software are serious risks, as well as how software can increase the attack vector on people as well as provide benefit. I'm not sure if the risks are worth the modest efficiency increase, and this isn't even getting into existential risks like external parties being able to control when you drive, or attacks on the networks or technology.

Even if the death toll 1/100th ... the few dead will be paraded as examples. There will be outrage. There will be lawsuits. You are correct, it is not logical, but logic does not always prevail.

Reactionary legislation is a risk to the industry.

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