To properly understand the legal issues presented by the burgeoning field of autonomous vehicles, we must first understand how they work. In a word: magic.

Unlike most other devices which operate by a defined set of computer-encoded rules, it is impossible to determine how an autonomous vehicle makes a decision. It may as well be magic.

We cannot burrow into an autonomous vehicle’s computer code and see a traditional “If-then” statement. There is no code that says, “If the car in front slows, then apply the brakes.” That is because an autonomous vehicle decides what to do based on its learning, as opposed to the knowledge of a smart computer programmer.

And its learning is embedded into a black box known as a neural network.

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