Who is responsible when a self-driving car kills someone?

Early Monday morning, an Uber-owned Volvo in autonomous mode struck and killed a pedestrian. The vehicle had a human driver behind the wheel when the tragedy occurred. 

This incident brings a sudden urgency to the moral quandary that ethicists have been discussing since before self-driving cars were a reality: Whose fault was this death? 

This is believed to be the first time a self-driving car has caused an accident fatal to a pedestrian. 

The closest thing we have to precedent is an incident in 2016, when a Tesla on autopilot caused an accident that killed its driver. After an eight-month investigation, federal auto-safety regulators found no defects in the vehicle's system, and determined that Tesla did not need to recall the model.  Read more...