Last night's episode of The Good Wife (S7, E7) appears to be the first depiction of autonomous cars in popular culture. The episode touched upon many of the subjects currently being discussed in the automobile industry - liability, security and machine learning. It turned out that the key to assign liability in the case was how the hard-disk that maintained the running log of the vehicle got erased.
This brings us to the next rule for autonomous vehicles, that essentially mirrors the proverbial "black box" inside airplanes. The "black box" is supposed to keep a running log of all that's happening in the cockpit, including aircraft performance metrics and cockpit conversations and radio communications.
Autonomous vehicles must be required to log a standard set of material events up to the point of an untoward event. The types of the data/events that must be stored are:
1. Sensor inputs
2. Drivetrain commands
3. Radio communications
4. CAN bus / Ethernet traffic
5. Central Processing Unit - memory, scheduling and execution logs
Once an event occurs, that memory needs to become non-overwritable until it is uploaded to a server which stores the information for the lifetime of the vehicle.
That's all for the day.
Kuntal.
