When a car accident has happend because of a smartphone, should Google or Apple be liable too?

This is a serious topic, which has far-reaching consequences (even deadly ones) in society. In my opinion we are partly to blame in this upcoming problem.

No, you should not have your phone in your hand while driving a motorized vehicle. Why a motorized vehicle and not just a car? Because the motorized part of it makes it go faster than we as humans could possibly do ourselves on a normal flat road. We are not good enough cognitively to multitask while driving a motorized vehicle. Just be honest to yourself about that. IF you can not help yourself use a Siri or Google voice, that at least makes it somewhat safer and buy a car holder for a few euro’s or dollars. Don’t give that privacy bs answer in this situation, we are talking about saving actual potential lives. Yes, Google and Apple know a lot about us and you maybe you have disabled your audio function because of privacy reasons, I get that. But being in a car you need to focus on the road and attention is a key part in this.

This about attention. If you want to check if you are good at multi-tasking try this YouTube video. Don’t lie to yourself, please, not about this.

 

But I think we are not fully to blame. Because these smartphones have on most people a more addictiveness than heroin or cocaine. This has already has been proven by design ethicist Tristan Harris. Here are some videos below that actually confirm this. So if you have had an accident, (hopefully not, just try to resist the urge, even when you are using your phone as your navigation.) you could argue in court that Google or Apple played a part in your attention span mishap. I don’t even know if that is a good legal argument.