The Future History of Autonomous Autos

• Self-driving cars will start hitting our roads within the next 5 years.
• When they do, there will be a lot of minor, but highly publicized accidents of a trivial nature.
• Within a year of self-driving cars becoming legal, there will be a fatality.
• A lawsuit will ensue where the family / friends / estate / insurance company of the deceased(the Claimants) sue the car manufacturer for the death.
• The car manufacturer will claim it was an accident.
• The Claimant will accurately point out that the death was a foregone conclusion resulting from a programmatic decision of a moral issue (The Trolley Problem).
• Depending on the judge and jury, whatever outcome this first case has will become precedence setting for autonomous automata like self-driving cars, planes, bikes, whatevers in the future.
• For this reason, enormous pressure will be put on the judge and/or jury to rule in favor of the car manufacturer.
• A public outcry will result when the court rules in favor of the car manufacturer.
• Conspiracy theorists will claim self-driving cars are part of a government conspiracy to cull the population. They are wrong. Self-driving cars are part of a corporate conspiracy to get us to be exposed to more advertising through watching more TV and surfing the internet while driving. I digress.
• As more self-driving cars come online, road accidents decrease.
• When the majority of vehicles on the road are self-driving (around year 2280 or so), road accidents are so rare they get special news coverage.
• Years later, historians will write about the rise of machine intelligence and how it all started with self-driving cars.

Credit: http://mor10.com