Скачать или смотреть With Driverless Cars, Who Is Liable for an Accident?

As algorithms take the wheel and human drivers move to the back seat, who's to blame for an accident? Driverless cars mean a total rethink when it comes to determining liability for an auto accident. Prof Anderson walks us through what to expect from tort law in a future where we are driven by autonomous vehicles.

Watch the full interview: https://www.talksonlaw.com/talks/driv...

James Anderson is director of the Justice Policy Program at the think tank The RAND Corporation.

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TRANSCRIPT
(abridged due to word count limitations)
Joel Cohen (JC): How does legal liability shift when the driver is a software, or cloud based artificial intelligence?
James Anderson (JA): That’s a great question. And the short answer is that there’s likely to be a shift in liability towards the vehicle manufacturer or the software developer and away from the individual driver
JC: That sounds like a sweat off the brow for American Drivers.
JA: I wouldn’t be too sanguine too quickly. There’s sort of a number of theoretical reasons to think there’s likely to be this shift in liability. First Does it make sense to blame the driver when the driver’s not doing the driving?
JC: I mean, you could use the analogy of a taxi cab. If a cab hits another person, you’re not suing the passenger, even though the driver is the agent of the passenger.
JA: No, exactly right. To cover torts in about 30 seconds., there are 3 classical justifications for tort law. One is economic deterrence, to try to deter dangerous activity; second is civil recourse or corrective justice, (where) the idea is to create a mechanism to allow people to remedy wrongs; and the third is compensation for the injured. And in all three there’s an argument that there should probably be a shift away from the human driver, toward the manufacturer or the software.
JC: Maybe you could walk us through those three. One seems pretty obvious. Why punish someone who had nothing to do with the accident?
JA: Exactly right, it doesn’t make a lot of sense and there’s... I don’t wanna get too much into the weeds, but there’s sort of a theory of economic analysis of tort law that says, well what you should really do is put liability on the person who’s the cheapest cost avoider… or the organization in this case. What you're really trying to do is create incentives for efficient safety and the idea is, ‘does it make sense to put incentives on the human driver’?
JC: How do you stimulate the market to create a safer car?
JA: Exactly right… Or does it make sense in this case… what’s the organization that’s gonna be more sensitive to those incentives? And frankly, even back in the early 70s/late 60s, there were some scholars that argued that actually the manufacturers should bear more of the liability so that they’d design safer cars.
JC: If i'm driving the car and I ran over your yard gnome, then i'm to blame.
JA: Exactly
JC: Im trying to think of a less tragic example...
JA: Even that, I mean you could, and this goes back to the point I tried to make earlier, that any attribution of causation for any crash is to some extent arbitrary, right, so any crash has a myriad number of causes and we often simplify in our analysis
JA: Well, it’s really unclear. And while there are lots of theoretical reasons to think it might shift, there’s also a lot of real world reasons to think that shift might not occur. And that has something to do with the way the automobile law system works today. After I was in law school, I got into a minor fender bender, and I called my insurance company and was like, “all right well, you know, we can depose these three witnesses and subpoena the city for their records of this and that and the other thing, and we can figure out what the traffic light timing was.” And the insurance person listened to me very politely but said, “well why don’t we just write you a check for the $200 dollars of damage it cost.
JC: Which actually seems like the smart thing to do there
JA: Oh absolutely. And the point is though that there’s this vast disconnect between tort law theory and all the panoply of the legal system, and the way that 99% of automobile crashes get resolved on a daily basis, which is if there’s any kind of dispute, it’s not worth anyone’s effort or worth the money to find the theoretical possibly...
JC: Its more like an actuarial decision...
JA: And it’s very administrative and its sort of a rough justice kind of thing, and particularly for small dollar figures and even when the insurance companies disagree, they don’t usually take it to court. They have an arbitration facility that quickly decides... again, it may be imperfect but it works, and it’s quite efficient