I wish the author the best in navigating this quagmire. Economics always struck me as political wonks arguing policy using calculus instead of rhetoric. That s

I wish the author the best in navigating this quagmire. Economics always struck me as political wonks arguing policy using calculus instead of rhetoric. That said, this looks like a reply to Slate's recent article: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.single.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/... What I immediately thought on reading the headline, without realizing we were diving into "robots are taking our jobs!" was this: how about people sitting at home driving our cars for us? If the packet was dropped or latency got high, the car would slow/stop/switch-to-auto-cruise. Badda boom, badda bing, you have the best of both worlds. And it gets better. Since you're using real humans to drive, you can take the sensor input and match it up with the real-world driving patterns to try to tease out some edge case behaviors. It'd be like Uber with your own car.