I feel punishment is largely a means to the end of reducing overall harm. If a vehicle is less likely to kill me, that's my preferred option regardless of whether it achieved that safety through negative consequences for the driver or through gradient descent optimizing a loss function.

I will happily ride in a waymo today, even though the AI powering it faces no consequence if it gets in a crash; it is clear that waymo is safer than human drivers in the areas in which they operate, so who would technically be liable in the event of a crash isn't really of concern to me