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Google Cars Drive Themselves, In Traffic
An anonymous reader noted that "At the TED 2011 conference this week, Google has been giving extremely rare demos of its self-driving cars. TED attendees have even been allowed to travel inside them, on a closed course. The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver."
The referenced article describes Google taking a car out into traffic on US 101.
In other words Google turned all the other drivers on the road into involuntary, unpaid, unknowing guinea pigs.
There's a word for that - irresponsible.
It really doesn't matter how safe it is, there are regulations for testing of devices with human subjects, those standards are there for a reason. They are included in HIPAA, to give a concrete starting point. A few decades ago it was a lot more lax, and a lot of really awful experiments took place, the bar now is set really high, and its a lot more strict than just being "safe". The FAA created the Class 3 license for experimental space vehicles, the NHTSA should be doing something similar if this kind of thing is going to proceed legitimately.
I for one am surprised that Google legal department would let this one slide, then again maybe they were never even told about what was happening, typical arrogant kids (I mean that in the best possible sense, of course).