Law Professor Looks at Driverless Cars

This can be  seen further into any autonomous systems.   We examined it for plant operations.

Is the Law Ready for Driverless Cars?   By Ryan Calo

Communications of the ACM, Vol. 61 No. 5, Pages 34-36
10.1145/3199599

I am a law professor who teaches torts and has been studying driverless cars for almost a decade. Despite the headlines, I am reasonably convinced U.S. common law is going to adapt to driverless cars just fine. The courts have seen hundreds of years of new technology, including robots. American judges have had to decide, for example, whether a salvage operation exercises exclusive possession over a shipwreck by visiting it with a robot submarine (it does) and whether a robot copy of a person can violate their rights of publicity (it can). Assigning liability in the event of a driverless car crash is not, in the run of things, all that tall an order.

There is, however, one truly baffling question courts will have to confront when it comes to driverless cars—and autonomous systems in general: What to do about genuinely unforeseeable categories of harm?

Imagine a time when driverless cars are wildly popular. They are safer than vehicles with human drivers and their occupants can watch movies or catch up on email while traveling in the vehicle. Notwithstanding some handwringing by pundits and the legal academy, courts have little trouble sorting out who is liable for the occasional driverless car crash. When someone creates a product that is supposed to move people around safely and instead crashes, judges assign liability to whoever built the vehicle or vehicles involved in the accident. ...  "