[michaelt]

  Does blame change though if there are ways the AI can 
  prevent this series of similar accidents, but they choose 
  not to? [...] Is it inconsistent to expect the AV to avoid 
  getting t-boned, but not expect it to avoid getting rear-
  ended?

While I was in college I worked on some wheeled robots that played a competitive ball game. We wanted to avoid collisions between robots, and to win the game.

One of the things we found was: If one team has great collision avoidance and the other team has no collision avoidance, the team without collision avoidance always wins. When there's a contest for the ball the team without collision avoidance just blasts in there, and when the team with collision avoidance back off to avoid a collision they lose the ball.

If autonomous cars were so good at avoiding accidents that you could merge aggressively and they'd always brake, and run red lights in front of them and they'd always stop, manual drivers might learn to do that.

Riding in a Google autonomous vehicle would be a pretty shitty experience if you knew you'd get four or five emergency stops in every journey when assholes decide to cut you up :)

[jjoonathan]

Since the AV would be keeping detailed records of everything, legal remedies are possible. I imagine someone would quickly lose interest in cutting off AVs if after a modest threshold they would start getting a bill every month.

[foxhedgehog]

As a general rule, I feel that technologists routinely underestimate the ability of people to acclimate to new technology. This is an insightful post.

[rwmj]

The Googlecar is collecting all this information about the behaviour of the other drivers: number plates, accurate time and location, LIDAR, possibly even video. No idea about the US, but in the UK such driving is itself an offence, you just need a way to prove it.

[sushirain]

So, human drivers will be faster and die more often than AV passengers. I choose slower and safer.