> You can’t replace yourself with a computer program and then choose to take only the benefits and not the responsibilities.
Look, I'm all for developers and (software companies in general) to be considering the ethical implications of the work they do, and the moral obligations that they take on as a result of it. However:
> We need to discuss how the developers self-driving cars will be held accountable for the crimes they commit. There is no reason the person who programs or the person who makes money from a self-driving car should be held less accountable for a crime that if committed directly by a person would almost certainly result in jail time. You can’t replace yourself with a computer program and then choose to take only the benefits and not the responsibilities.
This is a bad mentality to take with postmortems for software failures in general, at least from the outset. You need to look at the underlying factors that contributed to the issue, not simply looking for a person to assign blame to. It's possible that negligence is the underlying cause, but not necessarily - and even if negligence is a cause, what were the other cultural factors that led to the negligence happening, without being caught somewhere else in the pipeline? It's tempting to look to assign blame, but if you do that, you'll actually miss out on the systemic improvements that would be necessary to prevent similar incidents in the future.
But moreover, this is a bad outlook to take here, because this wouldn't be criminal behavior if committed by a human. From the best we can tell, given the details available so far, it's an accident, and it's very rare for criminal charges to even be considered in accidents like these, unless it's a hit-and-run.
> this wouldn't be criminal behavior if committed by a human
I can assure you that a human who is driving carelessly would be held criminal liable. Why do you assume an accident that was severe enough to have resulted in a persons death—the car didn’t just scrape them because they ran across the street—is not due to a reckless programming?
There are soooo many instances of negligent drivers killing cyclists with basically no follow-up from the police. Police all over the US seem to consider cyclists as second-class road users, and trust the driver when they say a cyclist "came out of nowhere". Since these sorts of collisions are more often fatal for the cyclist than the driver, there often isn't anyone to tell the other side of the story. There are rarely criminal charges, and even more rarely convictions (juries are mostly drivers, not cyclists).
> I can assure you that a human who is driving carelessly would be held criminal liable.
Do you see evidence that the car was "driving carelessly"? That's an honest question - from the reporting so far, it doesn't seem clear what the underlying cause was.
Secondly, this is demonstrably false: most pedestrian fatalities by vehicles do not result in criminal charges. If you don't believe me, look up the stats. Or talk to the countless bikers' advocacy groups that have been lodging this exact complaint for decades: drivers are not generally held criminally responsible, unless there are mitigating circumstances (the driver is drunk, the accident was a hit-and-run, etc.).
> Why do you assume an accident that was severe enough to have resulted in a persons death—the car didn’t just scrape them because they ran across the street—is not due to a reckless programming?
When a pedestrian dies, just because they died, that doesn't mean the driver is automatically responsible. It could have been the pedestrian's fault, or it could have been the driver's fault. Or it could be both. Or it could even be neither (a true accident, with no assignment of blame).
The same thing holds here. You can't assume that this is the result of "reckless programming", and to be entirely blunt, by jumping to that conclusion on the basis of literally no evidence whatsoever (and misinterpreting existing case law on vehicular accidents in the process), you're actually undermining the success of any future efforts to prevent these sorts of accidents in the future, whether or not it ultimately turns out to be the fault of someone at Uber.
You have good points, thanks for discussing this. I think for me the fundamental problem is that with a human we can characterize reckless driving as driving that a normal, competent human would not do. But there is no “normal, competent” self-driving car-so by what standard do we determine the program’s behavior to be reckless as opposed to just acceptable?
I accept your point that this accident might not have led to criminal charges if a human had been responsible. But I don’t waver on my argument that if a human driver would have been held criminally responsible for this accident, then we should we hold the executives (or in extreme cases programmers) of Uber responsible in exactly the same way, whether that be criminal or not.
Finally, with humans and pedestrian fatalities many cases involve drunk driving or sleepy driving. Self-driving cars can’t get drunk or sleepy; they can just have bad programming or bad hardware, both installed by their manufacturer.
Look, I'm all for developers and (software companies in general) to be considering the ethical implications of the work they do, and the moral obligations that they take on as a result of it. However:
> We need to discuss how the developers self-driving cars will be held accountable for the crimes they commit. There is no reason the person who programs or the person who makes money from a self-driving car should be held less accountable for a crime that if committed directly by a person would almost certainly result in jail time. You can’t replace yourself with a computer program and then choose to take only the benefits and not the responsibilities.
This is a bad mentality to take with postmortems for software failures in general, at least from the outset. You need to look at the underlying factors that contributed to the issue, not simply looking for a person to assign blame to. It's possible that negligence is the underlying cause, but not necessarily - and even if negligence is a cause, what were the other cultural factors that led to the negligence happening, without being caught somewhere else in the pipeline? It's tempting to look to assign blame, but if you do that, you'll actually miss out on the systemic improvements that would be necessary to prevent similar incidents in the future.
But moreover, this is a bad outlook to take here, because this wouldn't be criminal behavior if committed by a human. From the best we can tell, given the details available so far, it's an accident, and it's very rare for criminal charges to even be considered in accidents like these, unless it's a hit-and-run.