Collision in the making between self-driving cars and how the world works

January 26, 2012 | Source: New York Times
Robot Car

Self driving car (credit: Google)

Questions of legal liability, privacy and insurance regulation self-driving vehicles have yet to be addressed, and such challenges might pose far more problems than the technological ones.

Should the police have the right to pull over autonomous vehicles?

Human drivers frequently bend the rules by rolling through stop signs and driving above speed limits; how would a polite and law-abiding robot vehicle fare against such competition?

What about potential liabilities, which will be huge for the designers and manufacturers of autonomous vehicles?

Will there be unpredictable technological risks? For example, future autonomous vehicles will rely heavily on global positioning satellite data and other systems, which are vulnerable to jamming by malicious computer hackers.

And some trivial tasks for human drivers — like recognizing an officer or safety worker motioning a driver to proceed in an alternate direction — await a breakthrough in artificial intelligence that may not come soon.