Innovative Self Driving Cars: Who Holds Responsibility

In this short paper about self driving cars I state that the responsibility lies on the inventors of the self-driving cars for ensuring the safety of the people on the road, except in some cases which are to state below, together with the supporting opinions.

The most important certainty that we have, is that, before self-driving cars began existing, human beings went through a procedure of formulating innovative ideas, which led up to the final stage of invention. Human beings in their true nature, may err, hence, it usually happens that, they might design algorithms but because they are not machines, some logarithms consist of errors. The innovators of these self-driving cars are promising, proper data collection in the self-driving cars, providing a quick deployment, high and deterministic performance, along with the efficiency that is incredible in terms of application, controlling, packet processing and signal processing, all through artificial intelligent. All the promises they have, do not dismiss the fact that, self-driving cars are a result of human input and thus cannot be 100% safe.

Innovators of self-driving cars or computer engineers, behind the invention of the self-driving cars, must be held responsible as they are the ones promising the safety of their products. An example can be given in these ways, as much as the owner of the food brand that resulted in food poisoning unintentionally, in the society is held accountable, so should the computer engineer who put together self-driving cars. In as much self-driving cars have the potential to dramatically reduce 90% of all crashes that result from driver error, the 10% must be accounted for, if it is at an expense of a human's life. A human life is of great value and possess human rights which need to be always respected. The legislation has also put in place measures to punish violations against those rights. Thus, if self-driving cars injured or killed a human being, there must be a party who will be accountable for the incident. Now, exception will come into play in cases where human beings have been negligent in the sense that, the party being hit by the car was reckless, was drunk and was at fault or the party operating the self-driving car, neglected precautions that must be followed, prior to operating the car.

So, despite its capabilities it requires a proper route planning, decision making, motion planning and vehicle control in the road that is shared among the other vehicles that are either human centered or self-driving human assisted vehicle or the fully self driving cars and the pedestrian. Until such has been established properly, the responsibility will lie on innovators and inventors excluding in cases of exceptions.