In Praise of Self-Driving Cars and Fender-Benders

It's important to think about ethical decision-making in autonomous cars. But the trolley problem, with its action movie–like scenario, can overshadow questions that are more mundane but also more pertinent to most people. It's not as much fun to have a philosophical conversation about how real people in real situations deal with the risks of living with these new technologies. Most of us won't have to make a life-or-death decision like in the trolley problem, but we may well have to deal with technologies that decide who gets the raw end of a car-on-car, or car-on-human, situation. Take the woman suffering whiplash after her self-driving car braked too fast or the school crossing guard, accustomed to making eye contact with drivers when putting up stop signs, who now has to learn to trust autonomous vehicles to brake for kids walking to school. So many of the questions here are mundane: How will this technology change the shape of personal injury law?