Allowing A Bug Bounty For Self-Driving Cars Is A Conundrum

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

(Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/)

Bounty hunter needed to find a copper pot that went missing from a small shop. Reward for recovery of the copper pot will be 65 bronze coins. So said a message during the Roman Empire in the city of Pompeii.

In more modern times, you might be aware that in the 1980's there were some notable bounties offered to find bugs in off-the-shelf software packages and then in the 1990’s Netscape notably offered a bounty for finding bugs in their web browser. Google and Facebook had each opted toward bounty hunting for bugs starting in the 2010 and 2013 years, respectively, and in 2016 even the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) got into the act by having a “Hack the Pentagon” bounty effort (note that the publicly focused bounty was for bugs found in various DoD related websites and not in defense mission critical systems).

According to statistics published by the entity HackerOne, the monies paid out toward bug bounty discoveries totaled nearly $30 million dollars last year.