Kids With Wheels: Should the Unlicensed Be Allowed To 'Drive' Autonomous Cars?

Hallie Siegel (2973169) writes "From the Open Roboethics Research Initiative: Earlier this month, when we asked people about your general thoughts on autonomous cars, we found that one of the main advantages of autonomous cars is that those who are not licensed to drive will be able to get to places more conveniently. Some results from our reader poll: About half of the participants (52%) said that children under the legal driving age should not be able to ride driverless cars, 38% of the participants believe that children should be able to ride driverless cars alone and the other 10% also think that children should be able to drive autonomous cars with proven technology and specific training."

Comments

Autonomous cars should not be allowed on the road

[Karmashock]

If you let these things on the road then there's no point having a license at all.

It loses all meaning. An autonomous car doesn't need passengers or drivers. It goes from point A to point B navigating traffic, roads, right of way, etc...

Or it doesn't.

If it does, then whomever is on board is irrelevant.

If it doesn't then their requisite licenses are as irrelevant as that same person riding as passenger while a drunk took the wheel.

Either the robot is competent or it is not. These things are not being billed as sophisticated cruise control which means if the robot makes a mistake you will NOT intercept it. The consequences will happen.

And when they do... and they will because software isn't perfect.. the legal clusterfuck when someone tries to establish who is to blame for the pile up... the damages... the possible loss of life.

The current idea is to just make the insurance company responsible. But that means criminal liability is impossible. The insurance company just pays out whatever the policy says and that's the end of the story.

These things are a bad idea. I think they make sense under controlled conditions. For example, in the long straight highways between cities and only in that case used by long haul trucks. Effectively turning the trucks into road going trains.

But in a city? Moronic. For the average user? There are people I wouldn't trust with a car that get licenses... and I guess it would trust a robot over those people. But look at the damage the automatic transmission caused. Stop and go traffic is literally caused by the automatic transmission. It didn't happen before the automatic and would be unthinkable if all the cars were manual.

In any case... this is likely going to happen whatever my opinion is on the matter.

Just get ready for people to have thought this through very carefully... because they haven't... the unintended consequences are whistling down and are as usual most likely to hit the people that don't hear it coming.