How Will Autonomous Cars Change Criminal Law?

Within a decade or less, thousands of self-driving cars could be zooming on American highways, simply constabulary enforcement is all the same a long manner from addressing the safety and criminal issues posed past sharing the road with traditional vehicles, warns a console convened by the National Plant of Justice (NIJ).

The panel, comprising researchers from the RAND Corporation and the Constabulary Executive Research Forum (PERF), as well as selected police, industry and traffic condom leaders, recently identified 33 challenges—including 17 "high-priority" ones—that need to be addressed before vehicles operated past Artificial Intelligence create what information technology called a "radically altered reality" for law enforcement.

"The autonomous vehicle revolution will reinvent the ways that people and goods are moved, cities and roads are planned, and transportation resources are deployed and conserved," the panel declared.

"The question is how before long — not if — driverless vehicles go common sights in driveways and rear-view mirrors."

Noting that law enforcement is existence forced to play "catch-upward" with the fast-paced technology developed by companies competing to dominate the coming driverless-car marketplace, the console said the "challenges of crime-stopping, traffic control, public safety, and cybersecurity on the road can simply abound as more man drivers give way to algorithms."

The challenges listed past the panel range from developing ways to facilitate advice with a "responsible human beingness" who may exist controlling the automobile remotely during a traffic stop or emergency, to intercepting autonomous cars smuggling drugs or people.

Others include:

- - Developing standards for checking documentation of cars on the road when there are no humans to brandish a driver's license or registration.
  - Developing a mode to stop and secure autonomous cars that are behaving erratically and endanger other cars or man drivers;
  - Providing ways for a traffic police officeholder to communicate with the artificial intelligence systems driving the vehicle; and
  - Developing shared protocols betwixt law enforcement and the artificial intelligence engineers driving this new segment of the automotive industry on methods to ensure traffic safety and adherence to rules of the road.

If the potential safety issues presented past driverless cars sharing the highway with traditional vehicles aren't addressed, there could exist a long route of problem ahead for the law, the panel said.

"Equally the technology rapidly advances in coming years, police enforcement agencies must advance their training for a radically altered reality on the roads," the panel concluded.

car

Cockpit of a Tesla self-driving machine. Courtesy Tesla website.

The race to develop and mass-produce driverless cars, led past companies like Tesla, Uber, Lyft and Google (now under Waymo), already looks similar an obstacle grade.

"This is one of the biggest technical challenges of our generation," Dave Ferguson, an early engineer with Google's cocky-driving automobile team, acknowledged in a recent New York Times interview.

When Tesla came out with its self-driving car, which was a simpler design meant for but highway driving, many crashes occurred.

An accident in September 2020 involving an Uber vehicle acquired the expiry of a pedestrian, the first such fatality involving a driverless automobile. A test driver monitoring the car's progress was charged in the incident.

The companies insist the initial rollout of the cars will be limited and cautious.

"[They] will be able to operate on a limited set of streets under a limited set of weather conditions at certain speeds," said Jody Kelman, an executive at Lyft.

"We will very safely exist able to deploy these cars."

But before these cars can brand it out of the driveway, not only exercise engineers need to improve their production, but law enforcement needs to buckle up for the ride.

The console explored how specific scenarios, such every bit traffic stops, collisions and emergency stops, might exist handled in an autonomous car setting.

Noting that tests have shown a loftier risk of crashes, the console said police investigations volition focus on vehicle's mechanics rather than the faults or mistakes of a driver, and thus require greater knowledge of the cutting-edge electronics involved.

Law enforcement volition too need to accept into consideration how law-breaking could evolve, equally criminals could take advantage of this new engineering science and use autonomous cars to transport drugs or traffic people.

The scenarios addressed by the panel read similar the plots for a sci-fi movie:

- - A hacker from a hostile regime is ready to electronically commandeer an autonomous armored car full of gold bars leap for a Federal Reserve Bank.What'south to stop him?
  - An autonomous motorbus rolls up to a patrol officer who is motioning to divert traffic around downed power lines?How could a driverless bus comply?

The full report can exist accessed hither.

Gabriela Felitto is a TCR Justice Reporting intern.

Source: https://thecrimereport.org/2021/06/07/1333055/

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