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Comment by Grambo | Hacker News Reader

Actually they have to be significantly safer than driving today. People would rather be unsafe and in control than not in control and a tiny bit safer. I know personally if a self driving car could only drive as well as I could then I'd still want to be the one driving.

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People only have the illusion of safety when in control, and are also demonstrably incapable of judging their own ability to perform tasks. Your criterion won't be taken seriously by anyone involved in policy, because this is already well understood.

At a certain point the policy question will inevitably be: why should any regular person be even allowed to drive given the superior abilities of the machines? There are certain ideological assumptions that will then have to be debated. Making your own mistakes is a consequence of freedom. Limiting the freedom to make mistakes for the overall benefit to society is not uncontroversial - (see the gun control debate), and contributes to alienation in the Marxist sense of the term. There is more than utility involved here. Just because the trade-off doesn't matter to techno-determinists doesn't mean it it doesn't exist.

Cars are already extremely regulated. You can only drive at speeds dictated by the government in directions dictated by the government, turn in ways prescribed by the government. Your car has to be identifiable in specific ways by the government. You have a lowered expectation of privacy in a car.

I hardly think the argument will be difficult to just prohibit cars.

You can only drive at speeds dictated by the government in directions dictated by the government, turn in ways prescribed by the government

Sure... so you're saying that your steering wheel blocks when you're trying to make an uncharted turn? Or that your throttle has a variable hard limit, depending on the road you're on?

Where do you live, if I may ask?

While I agree with your first sentence, I think you're ignoring the fact that when media get wind of a case like this, it's almost only the irrational opinions of masses that matter. In western democracies, politics - and thus policies - is driven by pandering to the population (and bribes^Wlobbying).

That's a popular theory of how people behave but it doesn't play out that way. People overwhelmingly choose convenience and low price over safety all the time.

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