Accidents are necessary to advance self-driving tech

Photo credit: Zombieite

Discuss features short but strong and insightful opinions on interesting startup, entrepreneurship, and tech topics. Got a topic or question to suggest? Drop us an email or leave a comment.

Self-driving cars are supposed to be safer than human drivers. While we are still in the technology’s early days, people have begun to question the technology after recent fatal accidents involving Uber and Tesla’s self-driving cars.

How will these incidents affect the development of driverless cars in the long run? And what are the legal implications for such crashes? We asked Tak Lo (partner at AI and machine learning accelerator Zeroth), and Erwin Wan and Elias Arun from Taylor Vinters Via LLC (a law firm focused on supporting tech businesses) for insights.

Editor’s note: Answers have been edited for clarity.

Tak Lo, partner at Zeroth

Fatal tests may result in increased regulations since governments are striving to figure out how to deal with such incidents in the future. But like with any burgeoning tech, regulations can stunt the growth of self-driving cars. Before that happens, I think we need to accept some growth and also, failures. What regulators can do now, perhaps, is come up with sandboxes and frameworks to examine these issues, and closely monitor the development of these frameworks.

But all these things are great events to advance the industry. Accidents are constructive for the machine learning component of the self-driving technology. At some point, the technology has to meet the real world (including all the positives and negatives) because the industry cannot move forward without a real use case.

What self-driving companies should do now is work more closely with companies that have real experience in the automotive industry. For example, one company we help at Zeroth, Swerve.ai, has over 15 years of automotive experience working with Volkswagen and Audi. Such companies have valuable insights to offer that a lot of self-driving companies today don’t have.

Let’s discuss