Collision in the Making Between Self-Driving Cars and How the World Works

by John Markoff, New York Times

The legal and ethical implications of autonomous vehicles recently were discussed by Silicon Valley technologists, legal scholars, and government officials at Santa Clara University.

Even as Google tests its small fleet of self-driving vehicles on California highways, legal scholars and government officials are warning that society has only begun wrestling with the changes that would be required in a system created a century ago to meet the challenge of horseless carriages.

Google has demonstrated that autonomous vehicles could replace human drivers and greatly reduce human error, which causes most of the 33,000 deaths and 1.2 million injuries that occur in the U.S. each year.

Google’s autonomous vehicles currently have driven 200,000 miles without an accident. Nevada was the first state to legalize driverless vehicles, and similar laws have been introduced in Florida and Hawaii.

However, several issues, such as whether police should have the right to pull over autonomous vehicles, are unresolved, according to the University of Minnesota’s Frank Douma. “It’s a 21st-century Fourth Amendment seizure issue,” Douma says. The U.S. government does not have enough information to determine how to regulate driverless technologies, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s O. Kevin Vincent.

Even after intelligent cars match human capabilities, significant issues, such as legal liability and insurance, would remain, says Stanford University’s Sven A. Beiker. In addition, autonomous vehicles rely on global positioning systems and satellite data, which are vulnerable to jamming by computer hackers. Article

DCL:  CEP will be an enabling technology inside these systems but the builders may not recognize that fact.