To be fair, this happens in Russia quite frequently and people try to make easy money suing if they survive (Though usually it's aimed at only getting injured >_>). I wouldn't put it past people targeting a vehicle that they /knew/ would respond in a predictable way. Doubtful Google would lose in court, but hey, no court case is the best court case.But really, the scenario that even brings all this up is basically someone lunging out in front of an autonomous vehicle with the deliberate intent of getting hit. Which is suicide, which also doesn't fault Google.
Absolutely - thus the proliferation of dashcams and with them, hilarious .gifs of Russians faking traffic accidents. Because if you have documentation of it, you can prove it was deliberate. Thing of it is, a Google car kicks the shit out of a dashcam. All the collision avoidance sensors, the LIDAR, any sort of video, they're all streaming. And LIDAR takes up a lot less data than video. If I were Google, I'd set it to cache several minutes worth of data in RAM and then, if any sensor registered an anomalous event of any kind I'd write that shit to memory and upload it to the mothership. I mean, Google is going to be in the business of wanting to know about unknown potholes and shit in the road, not just fraud-minded jumpers. And they're Google. They could be emailing you a fully-rendered Sketchup flythrough of the accident scene in 3D space, raw LIDAR traces helpfully ghosted over the map, GPS coordinates accurate to the inch, timestamped to within 40 nanoseconds of the NIST atomic clock before you finish dialing 911. Which is another ethical issue to consider: Google is going to have lots of data about you and they'll analyze the shit out of it whether you personally need it or not. As far as our fraudster, though, the last car you want to go toe to toe with in court is gonna be a self-driving car.
100% agree, except: If at all manageable, I'd upload 100% if I were Google (Or 0% if I was not). You want big data, "every car on the road" is huge data. Crowd-source street maps (They already do this with cell phones for roads, iirc), plot traffic patterns, study wild-life, get ambulances in the area before an accident even occurs, submit request tickets to cities to alter traffic laws where the traction has become a bit too low. A camera on ever corner is both a sci-fi writer's and data scientist's dream. Even if they just took the position of selling (or opening) that data, that's A+ value to a business trying to pick out the next site to expand their offices / restaurants / outlets.If I were Google, I'd set it to cache several minutes worth of data in RAM and then, if any sensor registered an anomalous event of any kind I'd write that shit to memory and upload it to the mothership