[SystemSafety] Autonomously Driven Car Kills Pedestrian

[Matthew Squair]

I think Uber will come unglued in civil court.

If say the driver is legally deemed to not be in direct control but
‘supervising’ by the court then Uber is still liable for devising a method
of supervision of an unsafe device that demonstrably doesn’t work, and it
could be argued they could have reasonably known this in the
circumstances*. If the argument turns that the driver is solely the
culpable agent then as he’s also a Uber employee/contractor they’re still
responsible for his actions. So, which ever way it turns Uber will carry
the can, at least in a civil prosecution which is where this will get
thrashed out I’d guess.

‘Move fast and break things’ indeed…

*As the conversation on this thread would indicate.

On 24 March 2018 at 4:16:49 am, Peter Bernard Ladkin (ladkin at causalis.com)
wrote:



On 2018-03-23 17:40 , Michael Jackson wrote:
>
> So the responsibility in overseeing autonomous driving is worse than that
of an old-fashioned
> driving instructor in a dual-control car, teaching an untrusted
learner—you can’t even order
> the software to slow down: in short, it is far more demanding and
stressful than driving the
> car yourself.
Spot on, as usual.

Woods and Sarter, in their seminal study of pilots using A320 automation,
found it was worse than
that. When the situation got odd, rather than cutting out the automation
and taking control ("first,
fly the airplane"), they found the crew inclined to try to debug the
automation.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
MoreInCommon
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319 www.rvs-bi.de





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