Screw that.

Explain to me step by step how you walk.

Humans are held responsible if they cause harm to others. If a driver hits a pedestrian on purpose he is charged with murder. Who do you charge if a self-driving car behaves in this way?

Who do you charge when the brakes don't work on your car? When the airbags don't activate? When your rain sensor doesn't work?

Believe it or not, your car is not that primitive when compared to a self-driving one in terms of the number of things it does autonomously.

Isn't it the case that car manufacturers will have to issue a recall on defective models ?

Yes, and the same holds for self driving cars. I fail to see the difference.

the humans that designed the car? to be clear, computers don't intentionally do anything. if an engineer deliberately programs a car to hit pedestrians for no reason, they would be charged with murder. if the car hits a pedestrian as a result of an engineering mistake, the company would be liable for damages, and if particularly egregious, engineers might face manslaughter charges.

To be clear, that was my point. You can't punish the computer and good luck finding the one to punish for an accident ten years later. But maybe if it's free software...

Punishing bad driving is - I assume - intended to incentivise better driving.

If a company makes a self-driving car and that car then drives badly, surely the response needs to be to incentivise the company to improve their engineering practices, eg, spend more on testing, or require more levels of review of changes, or whatever other organisational changes they need to make safer cars. You don't need to find an individual person responsible to create that incentive. And if you really do want to find an individual responsible it can easily just be the executives of the company (and the executives are probably pretty easy to find even a decade later).

Well, you blame the black box algorithm that nobody can predict or understand, and you just call it an "accident".

Who would you blame if the algorithm could be printed on paper?

only if caught