A Social Consensus for how Autonomous Vehicles Should Function

We are quickly entering an unprecidented period in history where autonomous cars are hitting the roads and will soon become ubiquitos. There are many different companies building software and hardware to enable the world of autonomous cars. The hardware will quickly be commoditized, but the software will become the most important aspect of this awesome autonomous driving future. Each company will build an amazing in-car experience for their customers as well as the overall functionality of how the vehicle operates.

There is a burdon on each company building proprietary autonomous driving technology to make decisions about life and death. In the case of an accident, should the car optimize for reducing harm to the people inside the car or outside the car? Innevitabely one company will optmize for the people in the car, and another for the people outside. It would be more optimal for this burdon to rest on society instead of any one company, or government.

This repository is initially meant to be a place for people in the open source community who understand the technology behind autonomous driving to set the ground rules for how that technology should work. It's also for the greater (non-technical) population to have a voice in how our autonomous future gets created.

After time I hope this repo can evolve into actual code that can be implemented by companies building autonomous cars. This is a huge undertaking and no company would be forced to use it, but hopefully with enough social pressure and contributions from those companies we can all share in burdon of making these tough decisions.