Title
Blaming humans in autonomous vehicle accidents: Shared responsibility across levels of automation.
Abstract
When a semi-autonomous car crashes and harms someone, how are blame and causal responsibility distributed across the human and machine drivers? In this article, we consider cases in which a pedestrian was hit and killed by a car being operated under shared control of a primary and a secondary driver. We find that when only one driver makes an error, that driver receives the blame and is considered causally responsible for the harm, regardless of whether that driver is a machine or a human. However, when both drivers make errors in cases of shared control between a human and a machine, the blame and responsibility attributed to the machine is reduced. This finding portends a public under-reaction to the malfunctioning AI components of semi-autonomous cars and therefore has a direct policy implication: a bottom-up regulatory scheme (which operates through tort law that is adjudicated through the jury system) could fail to properly regulate the safety of shared-control vehicles; instead, a top-down scheme (enacted through federal laws) may be called for.
Year
Venue
Field
2018
arXiv: Artificial Intelligence
Tort,Pedestrian,Computer science,Computer security,Harm,Blame,Automation,Jury,Artificial intelligence,Machine learning
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1803.07170
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
1
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Edmond Awad1214.93
Sydney Levine210.69
Max Kleiman-Weiner36613.59
Sohan Dsouza4494.94
Joshua B. Tenenbaum54445437.33
Azim Shariff6152.72
Jean-François Bonnefon720720.53
Iyad Rahwan8134690.64