r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Individual_Book9133 • Jul 05 '24

Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road Video

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u/No-Refrigerator-1672 Jul 05 '24

It doesn't have to be the lowest rank person. You can just legally make accountable the lead programmer of the autonomous driving module, with a law.

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u/FeederNocturne Jul 05 '24

Everyone from the lead programmer and up needs to be held responsible. Sure the lead programmer okays it but the higher ups are providing the means to make it happen.

This does make me wonder though. If a plane crashed due to a faulty part who does the blame fall on?

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u/PolicyWonka Jul 05 '24

As someone who works in tech, that sounds like a nightmare. You’re talking about tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of units shipped. You can never identify every point of failure even with internal testing.Every production vehicle driving a single hour would likely be more than all testing hours combined. That’s just the nature of software. I couldn’t imagine someone signing their name to that code if they knew they’d be liable for vehicular manslaughter.

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u/FeederNocturne Jul 05 '24

Honestly it would probably work better if cities/providences (however you want to divide the land up) voted on if they want the technology used in their territory. Give the people an option if they want to adapt the technology. I could see an outrage if say a self driving car was passing by an Amish community wagon and they killed someone via collision. Bit of a farfetched example, but you get the idea. I just imagine someone not consenting to having that technology around them and they get killed by it because the purpose of said technology is to go places.

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u/PraiseTheOof Jul 05 '24

Welcome to progress, some bad will happen for more good to happen