> When a crewless train has a derailment, who gets blamed?

Why, the poor slob who last maintained the robot - of course!

Certainly not those who actually made the decision to use the unavoidably fallible robot in the first place.

As far as driverless trucks are concerned. I'm not so sure the public will tolerate that - and given the significant accident rate of auto-pilot test cars so far, they probably shouldn't. The track record is not that good.

If it is ever to become commonplace, much higher reliability and much safer designs will be required; but there are limits as to what can even be made failsafe. Some things simply can't. And in-vogue science fiction nowithstanding - no robot will ever be capable enough to cope with complex situations that were not already programed for, by an intelligent human.

And that intelligent designer ultimately must anticipate an infinite set of all possible situations at design time; something that not even a human can do, much less prove that he/she has actually accomplished it. However, failing that means that the robot driver / robot locomotive engineer, will never equal a human being in the drivers seat, as far as safety goes.

Make no mistake about it. Humans are fallible, but so are machines. And without "Failsafe" designs, which are not actually being used at all, anywhere in the auto industry, there will be carnage. And it matters not, whether that is caused by human greed, human error or robotic failure, the dead will still be just as dead!

Yeah I know - Neither corporate or government decision makers could care less about public safety - It's all about the money and the cold hard soul-less bottom line. Even PTS was legislated to benefit the corporate bottom line (the bottom line of the PTS vendors), not public safety - all under the cover of much pseudo-science of course.

But win or lose this is worth fighting against - with all we got.