We have yet to make autonomous windshield wipers that function 100%.

Not true. We have yet to market windshield wipers as being 100% autonomous, but I most definitely know of two people who live in fair-weather states and have never touched their luxury cars’ wiper stalks, per their own admission. All of the nuances and arguments one could consider around that are part of the point I’m making with this article.

Who gets charged with manslaughter when your fully autonomous car with noone behind the wheel runs over my child? Elon Musk? His head of Automous Design? Her Lead Engineer? You, the owner of the car? Your husband in the back seat who was using your car?

The broad stroke of this article is that we suffer great inefficiencies as a culture when we try to isolate and make alien issues that have already been heavily debated and worked on elsewhere.

The question you’ve posed isn’t a difficult one at all unless one is dead-set on pretending an autonomous car is a brand new, never-before seen thing, unrelated to any other innovation. If instead, we acknowledge that manufacturer faults have always existed, and that consumers have always been harmed by things they do and don’t control, and that we have legal documents to imply liabilities, and courts to debate them, then there’s nothing new here.

The party upon whom the liability can be successfully burdened is the one “charged”, and whether that party is charged with manslaughter or murder or merely fined is yet again a matter of what burden can be placed upon them. Sometimes the liability is obvious. Sometimes it’s complicated. You could inject any word in the place of “autonomous” and ask all the same questions as if they were brand new — they aren’t.