Law issues regarding autonomous driving (CDIO #Assignment 5)

In this assignment we will further look into the legal problems regarding autonomous driving and its application. As the technology of AD vehicles develops extremely fast today, the build of legal framework may not be able to catch up the speed and fully take care of the newly technologies onto the market, and that’s where problems might happen.

After viewing several materials, I found that the main ethic and legal problems can be summarized as following:

1.       Liability: Liability is probably the most major ethical issue regarding autonomous vehicles. Who to blame, and who should be responsible for accident if crash happens is always the hot topic among several agencies: engineers, manufactures, salers, users, pedestrians, governments or even law makers are all involved in this topic. If any of these accidents happens, often it is unclear or hard to decide who to blame.
2.       Society: Say, if large number of AD vehicles are released and used in the traffic system, which would make the whole transportation more intelligent and easy to control, it is for sure that will lower the risk of car accidents. Because if the system is operating as a whole, it is safer than individual drivers control their own cars. However, this state is far from being realized, and during the process of development, how to deal with the mixing issue of AD vehicles and non-AD vehicles. For example, if most of the cars are already autonomous driving, then is it proper to still allow manually driven cars on the road? Because in that time, the AD driving mode could be largely different from manually driving.
3.       Conflict between fast developed technologies and current laws: The AD technologies have been developing at a speed that faster than the completion of laws, because new things come up quickly but laws can take quite a long time to be established. Issues may happen that new technologies cannot be restricted within the legal framework. If that causes accidents, no law can explain the situation and the society would be in chaos. I guess that’s why many states in America and other countries are now clearly forbidding AD cars on the road. However, it is not easy to solve this problem, and it may require efforts from both government laws and manufacture regulations.
4.       Vulnerability of vehicle systems: When engineers designed the complex functions of vehicle systems, especially V2X wireless communication technologies, vulnerability of the system has always been a problem when it comes to internet safety and privacy. The complexity of autonomous vehicle computer systems can easily face the risk of failure or other safety issues like being hacked. As shown in some science fiction movies, it is not unrealistic to hack an intelligent vehicle and even do criminal things. So when large number of vehicle are controlled within the intelligent transportation systems, any single failure would cost a great loss.
5.       Difference in laws at different districts or states: It is easy to design and manufacture a car, but when it is sold in a certain district, laws always become the most complex things. Not to mention the different laws and regulations between countries like EU and America, even in different status in America, governments have different requirements on vehicles.
6.       Unemployment: nowadays in large cities still a great number of people make a living on driving, for example taxi drivers, bus drivers and driving schools. If cars all become autonomous, it may cause the job loss for many people.

7.       Trolley problem: problems also happen within the autonomous driving vehicle decision systems, for example, the trolley problem, Although Asimov’s famous three laws restricts the decision of intelligent systems to protect human lives, when it comes to ethic situation, even human is hard to make decision or say right or wrong sometimes, not to mention programming the ethic into control system.

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