[kayodelycaon]

The scary part of this is it went through construction cones and flaggers with stop signs to end up in the concrete. Basically, this thing went right through a construction zone without stopping.

Granted, people are this dumb every single day. But who is liable for the fines here?

[toss1]

YES

The problem here is dispersed responsibility so no one is responsible

The result is that no one takes responsibility for not actually creating blatantly dangerous events, such as blowing through cones, signs and other obvious indicators of a construction / no-driving zone and endangering construction workers & passengers (cones also initially mark a washout/bridge-out problem). To the software developers and managers, it is just some lower-priority edge case they'll handle later. To the corporate promoters, it's just a cost to be externalized on the public. To the regulators, obviously, they don't want to be seen as "Luddites", so they just approved MORE, not less, of these obviously-not-self-driving cars.

If a person actually had both personal responsibility (e.g., they will get fined or potentially imprisoned for approx. negligent homicide if death results) and authority (e.g., they can stop deployment until it is truly fixed after a car mistakes a truck for the sky and decapitaties the driver or blows through a construction zone) to prevent these situations, they would not happen as much. Who should have such responsibility and authority? Start with the CEO and board.

EDIT: stray words, tenses, added examples

[alistairSH]

Do we know that the paving zone was properly signed/controlled? The single photo in the article has a cone on the outside of the zone, but we don't see the beginning of the zone.

[kayodelycaon]

Even if the cones weren't perfect, a flagger should be sufficient for traffic control. It's same as if there was a police officer directing traffic in an intersection. Both are explicit overrides to posted signs.

Same with emergency vehicles, which self-driving cars have already been shown to ignore.

[alistairSH]

Sure, but we don't know if there was a flagger either. Only a single construction worker standing to the side.

I'm not debating whether an AI car should "see" possible construction, even when not marked appropriately (most humans can too). Only pointing out we don't know if this zone was marked/flagged - and if it wasn't, there's a higher likelihood of human driver error as well.

[kayodelycaon]

> Rachel Gordon, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Department of Public Works, said that the paving project on Golden Gate Avenue had been marked off with construction cones and that there were workers with flags at each end of the block.

[DerekL]

That's from the New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/us/driverless-car-acciden.... The linked article is currently from SFGATE. It may have changed since you made this comment.

[catboybotnet]

Yes, this is an issue self-driving cars. Roads and signage are not unchanging and always set up proper or the same way every time, everywhere, nor do they need to be.

Light control at an intersection out? They'll just blink red, indicating a stop sign. Maybe they're off, and they put up temporary stop signs on the corners, or as you mentioned, a police officer redirects traffic. And then a fire engine will run through it, as they need to.

[JimtheCoder]

Well, if a corporation is technically a person, I would say the owner of the driverless car. Assuming it is owned by a corp...

[underyx]

I hope fines will eventually get adjusted upward if they’re given to a company. A $10,000 fine would convince almost anyone never to plow through a construction zone, but the same fine for a company would only get them to set a quarterly target for incident count.

[LatteLazy]

The owner of the car initially. The passenger(s) and maker may also be liable depending on circumstances.

[sundaeofshock]

Under what circumstances would the passenger be liable? They have no control over the vehicle so I fail see how an event like this would be their fault.

[haterforhire]

If you hire someone to perform a service for you, and during the performance of the service they cause someone harm, you can definitely be sued civilly, or even be criminally liable (to take an exaggerated example, consider murder for hire).

No idea how that would apply specifically here though.