We already have a system for privatizing negative externalities in traffic accidents (and in 95% of the rest of life). It's called tort law, and it will certainly be used in this case if Uber was at fault.
There are of course situations were externalities fail to be privatized (e.g., traffic congestion), but I don't think auto accidents is one of them.
Do you program? How can you program and not be aware of the X deaths, Y privacy violations and pretend you aren't part of that system?
Is every programmer in the world partly responsible for every death caused by every programming bug ever? Should we blame all civic engineers every time a bridge collapses?
I am an individual, not "part of a system". Simply being a driver doesn't make me a reckless or dangerous one. For example, 10K of those deaths involve DUI, and I am certainly not part of that system. I'm sure 95% of drivers never kill anyone.
>I am an individual, not "part of a system". Simply being a driver doesn't make me a reckless or dangerous one. For example, 10K of those deaths involve DUI, and I am certainly not part of that system. I'm sure 95% of drivers never kill anyone.
Massive misunderstanding. As a driver your actions form a part of the traffic around you, even responsible drivers are "attached" to the system and put pressure on it. Maybe one day somebody rear ends you and you are knocked forward into a crosswalk, or you break suddenly to avoid hitting a pedestrian and cause an accident behind you. Or maybe your very safe driving leaves enough room for somebody to take a foolish risk cutting in front of you and lose control of their car. Collectively society accepts that getting places quickly is worth the cost that we pay in human lives. And each road user agrees to the small risk of death/injury beyond their control in order to get somewhere.
It's almost impossible to drive a car without threatening small children and other people with lethal force. People regularly wait on the sides of roads when every traditional custom, convention and current law demands that car drivers stop, but they never do it. "I want to get to the shops quicker" is not an excuse for levelling a gun at someone and asking them to please step aside.
Moreover, it is illegal to drive a car safely. If you try it, you will be pulled over. You may be fined or lose your licence. Try it and see. So yes, being a car driver does make you a dangerous one.
Perhaps the same standard should be applied to human drivers: if a human makes a mistake and kills somebody, the rest should be taken off the road for retraining.
I wonder how the issue developed when the automobile was first introduced. I remember something about needing to have a guy walking in front of the vehicle waving a warning flag, but apparently that didn't last long.
Yeah, possibly. On one hand, the Uber setup should be examined for flaws. On the other hand, we shouldn't get paranoid about the occasional traffic death when we've already decided (for human drivers) that this is acceptable collateral damage in the transport system.
The entire pitch for autonomous driving is that it's safer than human drivers. If that's false it's not clear why we should continue to allow Uber to test their work on public roads.
It could be safer than human drivers and still cause quite a few deaths. We can't evaluate such statistics from one accident. We don't even know if this particular accident would have been avoided by a typical human driver (there was apparently one behind the wheel of the vehicle).
That's reasonable while the system is in testing and in small scale use. If it ever becomes a major part of the transportation system, it won't be desirable to shut it all down every time there's an accident.
Not a meaningful counterargument here. Someone can not only drive, but have a history of having been an at-fault driver causing death, yet justifiably not believe that: public roads should be used for private testing such that the profit is private, but the harm is socialized; or that money compensates for lost lives.
And yet, people and companies undertake activities all the time that involve risks to life, and we do indeed attach a monetary value when those lives are harmed.
Or, alternatively, we do indeed have a cap to the amount of resources we are willing to expend to save a life - lives are not of infinite value.
Wat a completely terrible thing to say. This isn't about saving a life, this is about not killing somebody. Just because a company like Uber thinks it can make a lot of money doen't mean it can simply take risks like these.
Every time you are selling food you take the risk of killing people if something goes wrong. And what about carrying people in planes. These risks are taken continuously, for profit. How is that different?
Both of those industries have tremendous regulations in place to prevent accidents and injuries. If someone gets salmonella poisoning and it is traced back to a company, there is a massive recall at the company's expense. Air travel is one of the safest modes of transportation available (statistically) because of the NCTB and the rules/regulations put in place after each and every accident.
Air travel is only safe because companies have taken these risks with people's life. A society that takes no risk is a society that will achieve nothing new.
Air travel and eating food at a resteraunt is an opt-in action. To avoid this risk, you would have to opt-out of using the public road system that you are required to use.
We wouldn't except it if people got killed by selling them poisoned food, at least not where I'm from. Plane crashes are investigated and licenses are suspended and blacklists are kept, furthermore software is tested and verified before it is used in production. We shouldn't except excessive risks, see regulations with truck and bus drivers, just because a profit can be made.
But what makes you think Uber didn't test their software? When Boeing introduces carbon fuselage it is taking risks with people's life. They do reasonable testing but a technology isn't proven until it has been widely used for a long time. No risk = no innovation.
Since there is absolutely no binding federal regulation I don't have a lot of confidence that the level of testing is comparable to what's done for airplanes.
It's all well and good to not like the choice, but the choices still have to be made - how much are we willing to give up economically in order to reduce immediate risk to lives? Included in this must be the consideration that economic value can be used to save lives, through higher living standards and better health care.
Did you ever take an engineering ethics course? One of the things talked about is the monetary value placed on a human life. You can't make that value infinitely high or literally nothing can happen. You also don't want it super low.
We get it, its sad and money isnt everything, but the world cant stop because of a single death. If there is legal liability here then itll be handled.
Courts are equivalent of exceptions in computer programming. You should have them for exceptional circumstsnces but you shouldn't use them in your program for routine control flow (because they are slow among other things).
Other countries don't work the way US does. Instead of suing company you just notify the regulator and they do an audit. If company is at fault it is fined and ordered to correct itself and monitored if it does. You can get some money from the company but it won't be a payday for you.
Tort law covers death. Manslaughter is a criminal charge but wrongful death, etc. are how tort law handles the situation. You may recall O.J. Simpson was sued for wrongful death and lost.
Wouldn't one typically press both charges? Wrongful death to allow the family to be compensated, corporate manslaughter to punish the company and incentivize not killing people tomorrow. It doesn't seem like it's necessary to choose the non-criminal case.
Civil suits are intended to serve both purposes - compensation and deterrent (punitive vs compensatory damages). E.g. if you sue a company for doing you damage, the compensatory damages are based only on the injury you suffered, but punitive damages' presence and severity is affected by things like the level of negligence of the company.
The theoretical difference with criminal charges is that criminal charges deal with harms to the difference sovereign (ie the state and the public) that need to be punished regardless of the wishes of the immediate victim. e.g. you're not allowed to settle a murder charge out of court.
It depends on the details of the case. (IANAL either.)
Criminal law applies to criminal acts. It's possible for do something wrong that "injures" someone (physically or in some other way) without committing a crime.
Criminality generally requires wrongful intent. If you simply screwed up while otherwise obeying the law then you haven't committed a crime (negligence can be a crime, e.g. if you are more careless than a "reasonable man" would be this is in itself a form of bad intent -- so swinging swords around in public places while blind-folded isn't OK).
Also, tort law has a different standard of proof -- it is resolved based on preponderance of evidence rather than proof beyond reasonable doubt, so there's a lower bar than for throwing someone in jail.
Oh, and it's harder to prove criminal charges against nebulous entities. (Who's the criminal in this case? Uber's CEO? The head of the software team? The person who gave uber a permit to test their crap on public streets?)
Uber's overall conduct might approach the point of "criminal enterprise" at which point RICO statutes might be invoked. Not likely though.
The definition of manslaughter varies between states, and I am not a lawyer, but in general, criminal manslaughter charges only apply if there is an element of extreme negligence or doing something unlawful (like driving in an illegal manner) and causing a death.
For instance, there are accidents that cause deaths all the time; but they would only be prosecuted as manslaughter if someone were doing something considered inherently unsafe and unlawful.
If you run a red light, and kill someone in the process, it's possible you could be prosecuted for manslaughter, though even then you might not be if there could have been extenuating circumstances (sun in your eyes, etc).
In this case, there would only be a chance of a manslaughter charge if Uber were somehow being particularly negligent. In this case, it sounds like there was a human operator in the car, though the car was in autonomous mode. It's possible that the operator wasn't paying the attention that he or she should have been, or it's possible that even the human operator didn't see the pedestrian in time. It mentions that the pedestrian was crossing outside of any crosswalk, so it's possible that this was a tragic accident of them trying to cross a street with traffic without having been sufficiently careful.
On the other hand, it mentions a bicycle, but also says the victim was walking, which I find odd:
"Elaine Herzberg, 49, was walking outside the crosswalk on a four-lane
road in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe about 10 p.m. MST Sunday (0400 GMT
Monday) when she was struck by the Uber vehicle, police said."
Local television footage of the scene showed a crumpled bike and a Volvo
XC90 SUV with a smashed-in front. It was unknown whether Herzberg was on
foot or on a bike.
Anyhow, it is relatively uncommon for drivers to be charged with manslaughter in this country; they generally have to be doing something quite egregious, like driving drunk or driving at 90 in a 30 mph zone. Most of the time, the response to people being killed in traffic accidents is just that accidents happen.
Unless the operator was being particularly negligent, or there was some serious and known problem with the self driving car but it was put on the road anyhow, I doubt any manslaughter charges will be filed.
Remember, Arizona has explicitly been encouraging the testing of self-driving cars, so I expect that testing a self driving car, with an operator to take over in cases which it can't handle, would not be considered unlawful or extremely negligent. Maybe what the operator was doing could be, but we'd need more information before it would be possible to tell.
Do auto accidents fall under criminal law in Arizona? In NY where I live, unless it's DUI or otherwise reckless and/or intentional in some ways, it's just a traffic violation. You could take the offender to civil court, but that's still crazy. In this particular case, I think Uber, if they are at fault, would have to pay arms and legs to get out of this.
While the woman's death is tragic, I hope this doesn't set us back on whatever progress made in autonomous driving.
EDIT: removed "While this a serious f*up by Uber and"
Not sure why you think that taking the offender to civil court is crazy? It happens literally every day. And it the case of death you're going to get major damages. Normally these cases settle, but like it or not many, many people sue over serious and fatal auto accidents.
How do you know that? From my initial reading of the police report, the woman was jaywalking and ran out into the middle of the street. I'm not even sure a human or autonomous driver would have been able to stop in time. The only tech that might have been able to is Waymo's since, based on the video they released, they have a radar lock on every pedestrian within a mile of the vehicle and they do predictive tracking to determine their position. Even then, it might have still not stopped in time.
Uber still has a responsibility to avoid hitting jaywalkers. I would be more sympathetic on a freway, but this seems negligent. If they can’t avoid hitting jaywalkers they need to keep testing in a less dangerous circumstance.
You're making the mistaken assumption that this accident could have been avoided at all. While autonomous vehicles should have a higher threshold for responsibility than human drivers, it's not possible to expect them to never be involved in accidents. For all we know, the jaywalker ran right out into the road.
They're far better than human drivers but that depends on the system. In my personal opinion, based on the sensor video that Waymo release a few weeks ago, their self-driving tech is far more focused on safety than Uber's and their vehicles are likely far safer than a human driver.
have you watch the video provided by the Tempe police? The woman was jaywalking, but it was far from running out. This is something that Uber should have picked up.
Interesting question here: did Uber have authorization to operate automated in AZ? If not, and they had a human operator behind the wheel as a backup, is that human liable for manslaughter charges for not being in control of the vehicle?
Did Uber have authorization to operated automated in AZ?
According my reading of AZ Executive Order #2018-04 [0], presuming they meet the guidelines established in provisions #2 and #3, they do:
2) Testing or operation of self-driving vehicles equipped with an automated driving system on public roads with, or without, a person present in the vehicle are required to follow all federal laws, Arizona State Statutes, Title 28 of the Arizona Revised Statutes, all regulations and policies set forth by the Arizona Department of Transportation, and this Order.
3) Testing or operation of vehicles on public roads that do not have a person present in the vehicle shall be allowed only if such vehicles are fully autonomous, provided that a person prior to commencing testing or operation of fully autonomous vehicles, has submitted a written statement to the Arizona Department of Transportation, or if already begun, has submitted a statement to the Arizona Department of Transportation within 60 days of the issuance of this Order acknowledging that:
a. Unless an exemption or waiver has been granted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the fully
autonomous vehicle is equipped with an automated driving system that is in compliance with all applicable federal
law and federal motor vehicle safety standards and bears the required certification label(s) including reference to any
exemption granted under applicable federal law;
b. If a failure of the automated driving system occurs that renders that system unable to perform the entire dynamic
driving task relevant to its intended operational design domain, the fully autonomous vehicle will achieve a minimal
risk condition;
c. The fully autonomous vehicle is capable of complying with all applicable traffic and motor vehicle safety laws and
regulations of the State of Arizona, and the person testing or operating the fully autonomous vehicle may be issued a
traffic citation or other applicable penalty in the event the vehicle fails to comply with traffic and/or motor vehicle laws; and
d. The fully autonomous vehicle meets all applicable certificate, title registration, licensing and insurance
requirements.
There are of course situations were externalities fail to be privatized (e.g., traffic congestion), but I don't think auto accidents is one of them.