Ford is trying a set of blinking lights to help pedestrians understand whether a self-driving car is likely to stop or run them over. Somewhat interesting, but really I think the legal responsibility needs to be on the car’s owner/programmer and not the pedestrian. If this saves a few lives by preventing a few otherwise unavoidable crashes it is a good thing. If it creates an excuse to blame the victim, it is a bad thing. In recent U.S. history at least, the situation between driver and pedestrian has almost always been the latter.

A back-and-forth white light means the car is yielding. When the car is about to go, the white light quickly blinks. Ford said it’s trying to find a way to communicate that doesn’t use text.

Once cars are machine-driven, any pedestrian-driver communication gets a lot harder. So how does a woman walking or a kid biking check in with a car to know it’s safe to cross the street?

This article describes the safety protocols Uber had in place to try to avoid a pedestrian death like the one that just happened in Arizona.

Trainees spend time in a classroom reviewing the technology and the testing protocols, and on the track learning to spot and avoid trouble. They even get a day at a racetrack, practicing emergency maneuvers at highway speeds. They’re taught to keep their hands an inch or two from the steering wheel, and the right foot over the brake. If they simply have to look at their phones, they’re supposed to take control of the car and put it in park first.

Working alone in eight-hour shifts (in Phoenix they earn about $24 an hour), the babysitters are then set loose into the wild. Each day, they get a briefing from an engineer: Here’s where you’ll be driving, here’s what to look for. Maybe this version of the software is acting a bit funky around cyclists, or taking one particular turn a little fast.

And constantly, they are told: Watch the road. Don’t look at your phone. If you’re tired, stop driving. Uber also audits vehicle logs for traffic violations, and it has a full-time employee who does nothing but investigate potential infractions of the rules. Uber has fired drivers caught (by other operators or by people on the street) looking at their phones.

A Google automated vehicle has killed a pedestrian in Arizona, which has some of the loosest regulations on testing them. I learned about this from the Bicycle Coalition of Philadelphia.

This is certainly a tragedy. The Bicycle Coalition seems to condemn Google for testing the car, then goes on to make the point that human drivers kill people every day, every one is a tragedy, and there isn’t much public outcry about it. I agree with this, and yet I find it interesting that logic and our gut feeling about the morality of the situation seem to be so different. Imagine that changing all cars to self-driving ones would cut the number of people killed by 50% (and I have seen estimates of much larger reductions than that). It would seem immoral not to make that change. But at the same time, it would seem immoral to unleash a fleet of robot cars, knowing that a certain fraction of them are going to kill people, and by killing a few people learn how to not kill as many people in the future. I don’t know the answer to this, except that the technology will gradually get better, and insurance companies may eventually decide the human drivers are not worth the risk.