Praise the Machine! Punish the Human! The Contradictory History of Accountability in Automated Aviation

22 Pages Posted: 26 Jan 2016 Last revised: 12 Aug 2017

See all articles by Madeleine Clare Elish

Madeleine Clare Elish

Google Inc.; University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute

Tim Hwang

Data & Society Research Institute

Date Written: May 18, 2015

Abstract

What will happen to current regimes of liability when driverless cars become commercially available? What happens when there is no human actor — only a computational agent — responsible for an accident? This white paper addresses these questions by examining the historical emergence and response to technologies of autopilot and cruise control. Through an examination of technical, social and legal histories, we observe a counter-intuitive focus on human responsibility even while human action is increasingly replaced by automation. We argue that a potential legal crisis with respect to driverless cars and other autonomous vehicles is unlikely. Despite this, we propose that the debate around liability and autonomous systems be reframed more precisely to reflect the agentive role of designers and engineers as well as the new and unique kinds of human action attendant to autonomous systems. The advent of commercially available autonomous vehicles, like the driverless car, presents an opportunity to reconfigure regimes of liability that reflect realities of informational asymmetry between designers and consumers. Our paper concludes by offering a set of policy principles to guide future legislation.

Keywords: automation, algorithms, driverless cars, autonomous, autonomy, accountability, aviation, control

Suggested Citation

Elish, Madeleine Clare and Hwang, Tim, Praise the Machine! Punish the Human! The Contradictory History of Accountability in Automated Aviation (May 18, 2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2720477 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2720477

Madeleine Clare Elish (Contact Author)

Google Inc. ( email )

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Second Floor
Mountain View, CA 94043
United States

University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute ( email )

1 St. Giles
University of Oxford
Oxford OX1 3PG Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire OX1 3JS
United Kingdom

Tim Hwang

Data & Society Research Institute ( email )

36 West 20th Street
11th Floor
New York,, NY 10011
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
822
Abstract Views
4,181
Rank
54,866
PlumX Metrics