Humans fail in unpredictable ways all the time. Look at the cases of people using vehicles as a weapon of terrorism. How are we supposed to predict that?
Yeah, we can go back and investigate the person's life and say "see, they had a history of browsing extremist websites, making bigoted comments, suicidal thoughts, etc." The problem is that this description fits a very large group of people, compared to the subgroup which actually carry out the attacks.
So while it is true that we may have difficulty (or it may even be impossible) auditing a self driving car after the fact, it should not be any more comforting to know that human failure can be explained after the fact, given that the human failure was not predicted beforehand.
Yeah, we can go back and investigate the person's life and say "see, they had a history of browsing extremist websites, making bigoted comments, suicidal thoughts, etc." The problem is that this description fits a very large group of people, compared to the subgroup which actually carry out the attacks.
So while it is true that we may have difficulty (or it may even be impossible) auditing a self driving car after the fact, it should not be any more comforting to know that human failure can be explained after the fact, given that the human failure was not predicted beforehand.