Humans are extremely good at interpreting visual information, but have long reaction times and short attention spans.<p>Computers are poor at interpreting visual information, but can react essentially instantaneously and can pay full attention to all of their inputs indefinitely.<p>Nearly all crashes are due to those human failings of long reaction times and short attention spans. Even crashes due to equipment failure tend to be greatly exacerbated by those failings.<p>Autonomous car crashes are going to be due to unrecoverable equipment failures, software bugs, insufficient sensor data, and sudden unpredictable changes in the environment which can&#x27;t be avoided even with instantaneous reactions.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s strange to think that the nature of autonomous crashes will be quite different from the nature of human crashes. I&#x27;m <i>certainly</i> not stating that insincerely. I mean, fully a third of traffic fatalities currently happen because human drivers deliberately degrade their own senses and reactions before driving. Another big chunk are because of drivers deliberately not paying attention to driving.<p>The confluence of factors that need to come together to even create one of these ethically difficult scenarios is so unlikely that I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if it never comes up at all. If it does, it&#x27;s going to be single digits per year. And what&#x27;s the lawsuit going to look like? Alleging that some Google car should have killed a nun instead of the plaintiff&#x27;s child? I don&#x27;t think the law even supports this idea of &quot;you should have taken action to kill someone else instead.&quot; Even if it did, it&#x27;s not going to ruin the industry.