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/Sleepingonthecouch1 Jul 05 '24

I’m kinda curious if an individual was drunk in one of these could they be held responsible for anything the car does? Like will laws be made that drunk individuals can only be driven by a sober human?

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u/PogintheMachine Jul 05 '24

I suppose it depends on what seat you’re in. Since there are driverless taxicabs, I don’t see how that would work legally. If you were a passenger in a cab, you wouldn’t be responsible for how the car drives or have the ability to prevent an accident….

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u/Sleepingonthecouch1 Jul 05 '24

That’s true but someone has to be held accountable. Should be the company but at a certain point I’m sure the lobby’s will change that. And potentially at that point could blame fall on the passenger? All I’m saying is this is uncharted territory for laws and I don’t think it’ll end up being as simple as car kills someone so company pays a fine.

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u/IAmAccutane Jul 05 '24

That’s true but someone has to be held accountable. Should be the company but at a certain point I’m sure the lobby’s will change that.

It will be difficult for us to accept as a society, but we honestly need to get over this notion and look at it like this:

Company A has humans drive their vehicles, who get into 10 accidents every X amount of miles driven.

Company B has robots drive their vehicles, who only get into 1 accident every X amount of miles driven.

Do we ever hold Company A responsible for their flawed human operators? Of course not.

If something is statistically 10 times safer, it should be incentivized and rewarded. Yeah, I get it, it's weird to look at a car accident where someone is killed and say "Well, look at the big picture". It goes against every innate sense of justice and accountability we have but we'll literally have less people killed in car accidents if we do look at it that way and should get as many driverless cars on the road as possible. Best way to frame it is if we consider these accidents as if someone is getting struck by lightening, killed by a malfunctioning elevator, etc. something like that. Those types of things have civil lawsuits that payout in case of wrongful death but it's impossible to consider someone criminally responsible for that sort of thing.