Des Plaines, IL
Quoted from bobmathuse:(Puts on insurance hat.) Assuming accident frequency drops as early data indicates, rates would go down for everyone. They'd just go down more for people using driverless.
(Removes insurance hat.) IMO, driverless MUST maintain some physical override capability, not just a software cutoff. ("What do you mean you can't turn it off?") It's safer than many drivers, but not foolproof. For generic non-irregular driving, it's like an airplane on autopilot. When it’s complicated - - turbulence, landing, taking off, in heavy traffic near the airport, etc. - - we’ll need to have humans able to take charge instantly when necessary. Same for cars. The simpler phases of both can be automated because we have a pretty good idea of how we do them, so we mostly know when we code them what the code will do (we hope). For many complex phases we don’t fully understand how we do it ourselves; it’s much harder to program something like that. Even more difficult to know for certain how such code will react to never-before-encountered circumstances. But there will be some emergency situations where the superior reaction time of automation will make it better than humans if both come to same decision as to the proper course of action. Braking to avoid rear-ending someone comes to mind.
On the darker side, here's a scary idea. "Kill the grown-ups" becomes a kid sport. Assume the cars are programmed to sacrifice the driver rather than run into a child. Kids learn that and jumping out in front of cars to make them crash becomes a "thing." People could even encourage kids to jump in front of specific cars to assassinate the (non-) driver and or passengers. Great for terrorists, political enemies, criminals who want to rob the car's occupants, angry neighbors, etc.
Yes, I'm worried about hacking, too (okay, at exactly 11:00, everyone turns left), but even without it, there's plenty of room for trouble if it's 100% autonomous.
An other story can be an self driving tuck wipes out an school bus full of kids in an small town and the local sheriff wants someone to do hard time for it so it's goes to an criminal court and in the that criminal court they have some one like the cousin vinny judge that useing contempt of court on people from the manufacturer who say we can't give logs, source code, etc out due to an NDA and the judge does not like that at all.
