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In the long run, if self driving cars work, people will no longer be qualified to operate their vehicles. Would you let your toddler move the car 10 feet to pic

• lilsunnybee 12y ago
  With approximately 30 thousand road fatalities every year, people today are barely qualified to drive. But with so few viable transportation options in most areas, we make do with a bad situation.
• teraflop 12y ago
  I think there's room for a control system that gives a human a reasonable degree of direct control over the car's movements, while still having it be able to refuse potentially unsafe commands. Compare it to a microwave oven. The microwave flux inside the oven is high enough to cause severe burns if you were exposed to it, but the system is designed so that it won't run with the door open -- and it's fail-safe, in the sense that any failure (or combination of failures) is overwhelmingly more likely to result in a safe shutdown than in unsafe exposure. It's still possible to burn yourself on hot food, of course, but my point is that nobody thinks of a microwave as a dangerous piece of equipment that you need to be "qualified" to use, in the way that they think of a car or a table saw.