Editor's note: Prosecutors in the United States recently announced that Uber will not be held responsible for the world's first fatal accident involving an autonomous car. Jin Zegang, a law professor at Tongji University, in an interview with ThePaper.cn, says:

An autonomous car, newly developed by Uber, still in its testing stage, struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, in the US on March 18 last year.

The reason why prosecutors did not hold Uber accountable is that the autonomous driving system designed and developed by the company had detected the victim before the accident, but the car which was in computer-control mode failed to activate the emergency braking which the accompanying driver could also do. The driver who was supposed to be monitoring the car but who was watching TV programs on his smartphone instead may be held responsible for the accident.

The question is, will the driver feel wronged if held accountable, since the car was a "driverless" one and his responsibility should be at least different from the driver's in ordinary cars?

With the further development of artificial intelligence, the ultimate goal of autonomous driving technology is to completely eliminate the role of the driver. At that time, if there are traffic accidents like today's, who will be responsible under the law?

Autonomous driving technology inevitably requires the design and programming of AI systems that can make correct decisions to deal with rapidly changing road conditions, which means the AI will have similar risk identification and control power responsibilities as human drivers, making it possible for an AI to be held accountable in the event of an accident. If an AI "knows" an action will produce harmful consequences, but still chooses to act in that way, that in a legal sense constitutes "intent".

But even if AI has responsibilities similar to those stipulated in the Criminal Law, the legal responsibility is probably still inseparable from humans and it is likely to be the designers, regulators or users of autonomous cars who are held accountable for traffic accidents.