What if a fatal robot accident triggers a liability shock?
A fatal-robot liability shock reprices automation optionality lower: Nvidia/semis and Tesla sell as regulation threatens the deployment curve, and the disinflation thesis reverses. The market analogue is the 2018 Uber autonomous fatality (Arizona), which froze AV testing and dented the sector. Forward angle: liability/regulation slows but rarely kills the trend — the durable loser is the specific operator and its insurers; the broad semi selloff in the cascade is likely an overreaction to fade after the headline.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A high-profile fatal robot/autonomous accident triggers a liability and regulation shock. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Robotics productivity ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.