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Comment by esoteriq | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking that driverless cars would be a boon for people who cannot drive (for whatever reason -- visual or otherwise).

I do wonder, however, if laws will require driverless cars to have a person who is able to drive. (For legal or liability reasons in case of an equipment failure.) I do hope that doesn't happen, but it's possible.

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Actually once it's been proven that robots drive much better than humans (which is not very difficult), people will want to probably outlaw human driving.

You say that like it's a sure thing. As excited as I am about the potential, I think it's still to be determined how well robots drive in real world environments, alongside humans, at scale.

I wasn't really thinking about driving skills, but about equipment failure. There will always be a risk of equipment failure for automated machinery. Also, there's a risk of human error in the code governing driving.

One possible workaround is to have several people at some centralized location monitor driverless car performance. A monitorer could override the car and drive the car remotely in the event of equipment failure or bugs in the code.

But, maybe that's a pipe dream.

Unfortunately, I suspect the law could very well require a licensed human driver in the vehicle for just that reason. I would hope that this would change over time, though, as the technology improved and became more proven, because there is great potential in this for people who are unable to drive for whatever medical reason.

Maybe there could be some lesser qualification, between being a licensed driver and just an untrained passenger. After all, if you could simply pull over to the side of the road safely, that's about all that would be required in most instances.

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