Would I trust a driverless car with current technology to navigate a busy parking lot? Not a chance. Would I trust it with the 40 mile commute I had, 38 miles o

Would I trust a driverless car with current technology to navigate a busy parking lot? Not a chance. Would I trust it with the 40 mile commute I had, 38 miles of which were 6 lane highway? Probably. Would I trust it to make that same commute at times of low traffic when I'm likely tired myself? Absolutely. Not all driving needs a human's full attention, and the situations where a human doesn't need to pay full attention can be handled better by a computer which is immune to many of the distractions and weaknesses of the human mind. It's all situational and difficult to figure out, but the proper response is to keep plugging away at the parts of the problem you can gain some traction on and take what you can get. Sure, I think we're in complete agreement here. But the idea raised in the article that we're going to see driverless cabs on the Las Vegas Strip? I really don't think so. The day when we can trust a completely driverless car to wander round on its own without hitting anything is a helluva long way off. In the meantime my main concern is that the hybrid human/computer driver might wind up with the worst features of both. It'd be much like an airliner, which can pretty much fly itself from origin to destination 99% of the time, but needs a carefully trained pilot for the occasions when something goes wrong... except that when an unexpected situation crops up on the road it requires a split-second decision, not the several minutes which airline pilots usually get.