[Paper Review] Fast or Accurate? Governing Conflicting Goals in Highly Autonomous Vehicles

A. Feder Cooper, Karen Levy|arXiv (Cornell University)|Aug 3, 2022

Human-Automation Interaction and Safety4 citations

TL;DR

This paper identifies the critical engineering trade-off between speed and accuracy in autonomous vehicles (AVs) as a central regulatory challenge, proposing that policymakers must govern this tension to ensure safety, accountability, and equity. By analyzing how AV systems balance responsiveness and precision, the authors advocate for ex ante safety standards and ex post liability mechanisms that shift power from manufacturers to the public.

ABSTRACT

The tremendous excitement around the deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) comes from their purported promise. In addition to decreasing accidents, AVs are projected to usher in a new era of equity in human autonomy by providing affordable, accessible, and widespread mobility for disabled, elderly, and low-income populations. However, to realize this promise, it is necessary to ensure that AVs are safe for deployment, and to contend with the risks AV technology poses, which threaten to eclipse its benefits. In this Article, we focus on an aspect of AV engineering currently unexamined in the legal literature, but with critical implications for safety, accountability, liability, and power. Specifically, we explain how understanding the fundamental engineering trade-off between accuracy and speed in AVs is critical for policymakers to regulate the uncertainty and risk inherent in AV systems. We discuss how understanding the trade-off will help create tools that will enable policymakers to assess how the trade-off is being implemented. Such tools will facilitate opportunities for developing concrete, ex ante AV safety standards and conclusive mechanisms for ex post determination of accountability after accidents occur. This will shift the balance of power from manufacturers to the public by facilitating effective regulation, reducing barriers to tort recovery, and ensuring that public values like safety and accountability are appropriately balanced.

Motivation & Objective

• To identify the unexamined engineering trade-off between speed and accuracy in AV systems as a pivotal factor in safety and accountability.
• To address the lack of legal and regulatory frameworks that account for this technical trade-off in AV development and deployment.
• To empower policymakers with tools to assess how speed-accuracy trade-offs are implemented in AV systems.
• To support the creation of concrete, ex ante safety standards and conclusive ex post accountability mechanisms after AV accidents.
• To rebalance power from AV manufacturers to the public by embedding public values like safety and equity into regulatory design.

Proposed method

• Analyzes the technical architecture of AV perception and decision-making systems to identify where speed and accuracy trade-offs emerge.
• Examines how real-time processing constraints influence AV responses, particularly in high-stakes scenarios like collision avoidance.
• Proposes regulatory frameworks that treat the speed-accuracy trade-off as a governable variable, not a technical inevitability.
• Develops conceptual tools for policymakers to evaluate how AV systems prioritize speed versus accuracy in design and operation.
• Integrates legal and technical perspectives to propose standards that can be applied before deployment (ex ante) and used after incidents (ex post).
• Uses case-based reasoning to illustrate how different trade-off choices affect liability and public trust in AV systems.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How does the speed-accuracy trade-off in AV systems influence safety outcomes and accident liability?
• RQ2 What regulatory mechanisms can be developed to govern the speed-accuracy trade-off in AV engineering decisions?
• RQ3 How can policymakers assess whether AV systems are prioritizing speed over accuracy in ways that compromise public safety?
• RQ4 In what ways does the current absence of regulatory attention to this trade-off undermine accountability after AV accidents?
• RQ5 How can ex ante standards and ex post accountability mechanisms be designed to reflect public values like equity and safety?

Key findings

• The speed-accuracy trade-off in AV systems is a fundamental engineering constraint that directly affects safety and liability outcomes.
• Current legal and regulatory frameworks fail to account for this trade-off, creating gaps in accountability and risk management.
• Policymakers can develop tools to assess how AVs implement the speed-accuracy trade-off, enabling more informed regulation.
• Ex ante safety standards based on trade-off governance can reduce the risk of unsafe AV behavior before deployment.
• Ex post mechanisms for liability can be more conclusive if they include analysis of how speed and accuracy were balanced in the AV’s decision-making process.
• Shifting regulatory focus to this trade-off can rebalance power from manufacturers to the public, enhancing equity and transparency in AV deployment.