Federal highway regulators, aiming to help companies figure out how to meet safety standards when designing cars, are willing to consider a computer running an autonomous vehicle as the “driver.”…
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wsj.com
It seems to have been on again – off again with insurance companies accepting liability for any accidents caused by driverless cars.
One way or another I have been in the ITC industry all of my career. I have dealt with computer crashes, failed backups, failed updates and much more during those years at work and at home.
Some of those problems came from the technology, faulty chips are not unusual, if not commonplace. Sometimes updates work, sometimes updates contain new bugs or problems. Sometimes backups work, sometimes they don’t.
Systems that control some of our most important technologies fail from time to time, especially when they are overloaded, take electronic banking for example. The banks typically guarantee our money of things go wrong, but what happens if something goes wrong at 130km per hour?
I love the confidence and it may be that it is the computer that fails, or it may be that the computer fails to comprehend decisions made by humans. There will be some very interesting cases of crashes where the human driver may not have broken the law, however the car computer may have misinterpreted what happened and in fact cause a crash.
I heard a statistic on the news recently about plane crashes, saying some huge percentage, most plane crashes were caused by pilot error. We very rarely hear about computer malfunctions or equipment malfunctions (at least in the media, I have been grounded many times due to technology failure as will most frequent fliers. Of course plane manufacturers have significant financial assets at their disposal in the case of a law suit, as would Google or a car manufacturer.
Things are going to get very interesting. Don’t get me wrong, I totally support platooning of trucks and other forms of autonomous vehicle use. I just have a few concerns that I am sure will get sorted, right?
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