A Philosophy for Developing Trust in Self-driving Cars

For decades, our lives have depended on the safe operation of automated mechanisms around and inside us. The autonomy and complexity of these mechanisms is increasing dramatically. Autonomous systems such as self-driving cars rely heavily on inductive inference and complex software, both of which confound traditional software-safety techniques that are focused on amassing sufficient confirmatory evidence to support safety claims. In this paper we survey existing methods and tools that, taken together, can enable a new and more productive philosophy for software safety that is based on Karl Popper's idea of falsificationism.