2nd ICAI 2022

International Conference on Automotive Industry 2022

Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic

2. Who is responsible for the damage caused? Autonomous cars are “self-learning systems”: imbued with machine learning algorithms, they learn to make decisions (in this case, to drive) merely by finding patterns in huge data sets and through their own experience. The decisions they make are, therefore, autonomous: they do not depend on the will of both the manufacturer and the driver, and as a rule, being outside the sphere of action and influence of both, they cannot be attributed to them. Such autonomous decisions, however, can also cause accidents. One can think of the example of one of Waymo’s self-driving cars (at the time, still Google): on a road in the United States, the vehicle wanted to veer into the lane on its left. Believing that an oncoming bus would allow him to pass, he changed lanes, then crashed into the bus. The human driver monitoring the vehicle, also believing the bus would pass, did not intervene. In the United States, there are authors who defend the absence of the need for legislative changes for civil liability for damages caused by autonomous vehicles (Levy, J., 2015), arguing that the civil liability system has adapted with relative success to new technologies over decades. On the other hand, there are those who argue that more detailed legislation is imperative to divide the shares of responsibility between the various actors in the production chain of autonomous vehicles, such as manufacturers, software and hardware producers, among others (Taeihagh, A. et al, 2019). In the European Union, there are studies that point to the incongruity of attributing civil liability to robots by attributing to them a legal personality of their own (Nevejans, N., 2016). The reasons for this range from the fictitious character of this eventual legal personality, through the displacement of the humanist axis on which the European Union is founded, to the risk of diminishing the status of the human being, which would be being leveled, to a greater or lesser degree, with an artificial intelligence. As for Brazilian legislation, Artificial Intelligence agents are not yet recognized as individuals subject to law enforcement. This makes them irresponsible for possible damages caused and implies that, according to our legal system, such agents cannot be held responsible for actions or omissions that cause damages to third parties. This does not result in the automatic exclusion of the existence of an eventual (physical/legal) personality of their own. In this sense, the Civil Code is the greatest expression of private law in Brazil, and it is the law that most closely seeks to meet the demands of citizens. Taking this code as a reference, there is civil liability, which consists of the obligation to repair the damage that one person causes to another. The theory of civil liability aims at determining the conditions under which the individual can be held responsible for the damage suffered by another person, and the extent to which he is obliged to repair it. Therefore, in any situation in which the person has their rights harmed as a result of someone else’s act, they must be compensated in order to compensate for the fact. A major conflict on the issue regarding autonomous cars seeks to identify the civil responsible for an autonomous vehicle involved in an

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