It’s been more than five years since an Uber self-driving car struck and killed a woman named Elaine Herzberg as she walked her bicycle across a road in Tempe, Arizona. Herzberg’s death instantly turned what had been a philosophical conundrum into a glaringly real, legal one: Who gets blamed for a road fatality in the awkward, liminal era of self-driving cars, when humans are essentially babysitters of imperfect, still-learning AI systems? Is it the company with the erring car? Or the person behind the wheel who should have intervened?
On Friday, we got an answer: It’s the person sitting behind the wheel. In an Arizona courtroom, the test operator during
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