One of the themes I hit in class is that legislation tends to follow the emergence of new technologies. The same is true for court decisions because new types of disputes present themselves and judges sometimes have to wing it when deciding issues of liability.
If you are rear ended by one, who is responsible? The owner or the programmer? A court will undoubtedly have to sift this through. Of courser this is a trick question at the moment since no one has yet to be rammed by one when it is in driverless mode - only when it is driven by a human.
Andrew Sullivan points to a story about the legal consequences of the development of the driverless car. Some of what they can do may never be legal.
There's a wide gap between having a prototype and going to market, and it's particularly gaping for anything with a combustion engine. The law has a lot to say about cars, especially about who’s allowed to drive them, and answering all the legal questions could easily take the rest of the decade.
For instance, when a self-driving car gets in a fender bender, who's liable for the damages? Should a computer choose to hit an animal or swerve off the road? How does the DMV give a robot an eye exam?
As the technical limitations fall away, these legal questions are becoming the self-driving car's biggest challenge. Unfortunately for Google, the solutions will have to come from lawyers and legislators rather than engineers.
. . . This is the nitty gritty of automotive law, not just the rules of who gets on the road but the web of regulations and statutes that decide what happens once you're there. For automated drivers, most of these rules have yet to be written, and they'll need to be handled extremely delicately. If the liability laws are too punitive towards driver bots, letting Paul and Julie join in a suit against the self-driving-tech developer, then companies might avoid the sector entirely. On the other hand, if the laws leave car-owners on the hook for anything the new gadgets do, consumers may be scared away from buying them. There's a balance to be struck, but it will have to be made across multiple courts and stand up to countless civil challenges.
Public policy formation ain't easy
