alt Hacker NewsMore straightforwardly, people are generally very forgiving when people make mistakes, and very unforgiving when computers do. Look at how we view a person accidentally killing someone in a traffic accident versus when a robotaxi does it. Having people run it on their own hardware makes them take responsibility for it mentally, so gives a lot of leeway for errors.
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Traffic accidents are the same symptom of fundamentally different underlying problems among human-driven and algorithmically-driven vehicles. Two very similar people differ more than the two most different robo taxis in any given uniform fleet— if one has some sort of bug or design shortcoming that kills people, they almost certainly all will. That’s why product (including automobile) recalls exist, but we don’t take away everyone’s license when one person gets into an accident. People have enough variance that acting on a whole population because of individual errors doesn’t make sense— even for pretty common errors. The cost/benefit is totally different for mass-produced goods.
Also, when individual drivers accidentally kill somebody in a traffic accident, they’re civilly liable under the same system as entities driving many cars through a collection of algorithms. The entities driving many cars can and should have a much greater exposure to risk, and be held to incomparably higher standards because the risk of getting it wrong is much, much greater.
I think that’s generally because humans can be held accountable, but automated systems can not. We hold automated systems to a higher standard because there are no consequences for the system if it fails, beyond being shut off. On the other hand, there’s a genuine multitude of ways that a human can be held accountable, from stern admonishment to capital punishment.
I’m a broken record on this topic but it always comes back to liability.