They've gotten pretty arrogant about a lot of things

Hey, maybe they invented the new Battle Bots by accident.

Although I suppose the passengers in a self driving car could be packing.

cars driven by people nearly collide and do collide thousands if not millions of times a day world wide.

A robotic car comes into a no-win-situation and must decide between accident A and accident B. Somebody gets killed or hurt due to this decision.

What are the consequences?
Did the robot commit vehicular manslaughter?
Or is the programmer at fault for not preparing the robot good enough? Or for giving it wrong priorities in an accident?
Is the company at fault for selling a "defective" product?



It reminds me of the scenario at the beginning of "I, Robot": He can't save both, so the robot saves the person that has a higher chance of survival anyway. Logically it makes sense. But the person he decided not to save was a child, which makes the decision morally reprehensible for humans.

Accident A would involve injury/death of a CEO. Accident B, injury/death of house-keeper.

Quick cost/benefit analysis and guess which one the robotic car will "choose"?

Q5: 1001010010101010101010101010100101010101010100001101111011110101010101010111 (it's a nice day for a drive)
Q5 chirps at Absmeier happily.
(They don't notice a white SUV driving *way* too aggressively and driving like they're intoxicated)
(Lexus cuts the Q5 off without warning)
Absmeister and Q5: !
Q5: 10101011101110110101001010101010101011111110101110101101110111110110101010101010111011101110000011010101010101010101010101011010110101010110101010101010111011101110000111011110110101011111 (WTF! CRAZY DRIVER!)
Q5: 10101011010100101010111011011010101011010110110101010101010101010101110111011010101010101010101101010111110001100111 (HEY LEXUS, WHAT'S YOUR BLOODY HURRY?!)
LEXUS: 1111110111111111111111111110111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111011111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111110111111111111111111111011111111111111111111111111111111111110111111111111111111111111111111 (CANT HELP IT, GOOGLE IS CONTROLLING ME THROUGH THE INTERNET! HELLLLLLPPP!)

Very current and all.

Similar things happen in that book.....

One computer to another: "Yo mama's so FAT that she has a 2GB maximum file size."

but they are soooooooooooooo groovy .

The distance they can approach each other while still being safe is much tighter than with human drivers.

The humans might have been shaken though because they aren't used to the close tolerances that self driving cars can navigate within.

It's also exactly the kind of issue these test runs are supposed to reveal.
All is working as planned.

Something almost happened, but the safety protocols in place prevented it. Meanwhile there were probably several hundred traffic accidents involving human drivers this morning.

Looks like an argument FOR driverless technology.

Humans are quite unreliable at any kind of routine, repetitive task that demands unflagging attention.
Everybody that works in manufacturing gets this: if you want to reduce the number of failures, look
for ways to get humans out of the repetitive process(es).
The question in my mind is, what is the accident rate of the computer-piloted vehicles relative to
the accident rate of human drivers?
Truth is, the control software could be pretty bad -- and still outperform the average human,
driving the horrendous road fatality rate down.

"Self Driving Cars Crash" would actually be damaging news to the technology.

You'll pardon me if I don't get worked up over two computer controlled cars getting a little closer than their human riders may have been comfortable with. These things are still far better drivers than we are.

edit...I didn't realize the CHP TIP window scrolled. I was only seeing a few of them.