this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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Seems like jury verdicts don't set a legal precedent in the US but still often considered to have persuasive impact on future cases.
This kinda makes sense but the articles on this don't make it very clear how impactful this actually is - here crossing fingers for Tesla's down fall. I'd imagine launching robo taxis would be even harder now.
It's funny how this legal bottle neck was the first thing AI driving industry research ran into. Then, we kinda collectively forgot that and now it seems like it actually was as important as we thought it would be. Let's say once robo taxis scale up - there would be thousands of these every year just due sheer scale of driving. How could that ever work outside of places like China?
What jury results do is cost real money - companies often (not always) change in hopes to avoid more.
Yeah but also how would this work at full driving scale. If 1,000 cases and 100 are settled for 0.3 billion that's already 30 billion a year, almost a quarter of Tesla's yearly revenue. Then in addition, consider the overhead of insurance fraud etc. It seems like it would be completely legally unsustainable unless we do "human life costs X number of money, next".
I genuinely think we'll be stuck with humans for a long time outside of highly controlled city rides like Wayno where the cars are limited to 40km hour which makes it very difficult to kill anyone either way.
We have numbers already from all the human drivers caused death. Once someone makes self driving safer than humans (remember drinkingiisia factor in many human driver caused deaths and so non-drinkers will demand this be accountee for.
No the issue still remains on who's actually responsible? With human drivers we always have someone to take the blame but with robots? Who's at fault when a self driving car kills someone? The passenger? Tesla? Someone has to be sued and it'll be Tesla so even if its 1% of total accidents the legal instructions will be overwhelmed because the issue is 1000% harder to resolve.
Once Tesla starts losing multiple 300M lawsuits the flood gates will be open and the company is absolutely done.
That is an issue.
i just realized that I didn't finish the thought. Once self driving is statistically safer we will ban human drivers. Some places it will be by law, Some the more subtile insurance costs, some by something else.
We need to figure out liability of course. I have ideas but nobody will listen so noebuint in writting.
One challenge here is that we generally value human life pretty high, well at least speaking from legal compensation pov. So you can't sue Joe the drunk driver for killing your husband for 300 million but you can do thay to Tesla.
In authoritarian states like china maybe society can be forced into accepting "for greater good" sort of mentality but it's not going to happen in the west imo.