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Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully within the next 30 years or so, we will gradually phase out driver's licenses. Much like how smoking was ubiquitous in the 50s & 60s, but as we as a society came to realize its grave dangers, it gradually became illegal in many public places.

The idea that we allow almost anyone 16 or older to control several thousand pounds of metal that can travel at high speeds really is quite absurd when you think about it. There are more than 30,000 deaths every year due to car accidents, and hundreds of thousands more injuries.

It's amazing how screwed up our society's priorities are. That's ten 9/11's worth of deaths every year from car accidents. By the time the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have ended, we'll have spent around $4 trillion on them altogether[0]. If even 1/100th of that had been redirected to research on self-driving car technology, we might have already saved tens of thousands of lives.

0: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/29/us-usa-war-idUSTRE...

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It's amazing how screwed up our society's priorities are.

Consider it rationally. Driving is costly, but it engenders an entire host of benefits & pleasures I don't think you're even considering.

I'm not saying I'm happy driving is dangerous, but saying "Driving is dangerous, and yet we do it? WTF?" is ridiculous.

> Consider it rationally. Driving is costly, but it engenders an entire host of benefits & pleasures I don't think you're even considering.

I am considering it entirely rationally. I believe that we should be investing more money into research that could save 30,000 lives every year. Never did I suggest in my initial post that human driving should be banned before self-driving cars are capable of replacing humans in this capacity. If done correctly, self-driving cars will have all the benefits of current automobiles, and then some.

As for the pleasures of driving - that's what a whole lot of people said about cigarettes, but look where we are now. And don't be silly - no one's personal "pleasures" override the safety of other people's lives.

Research? We've known for centuries how to get by without conveying ourselves everywhere in 4,000 pound steel cages. It's called population density, mass transit when a community exceeds a certain size, and having vital services (drugstores, groceries, maybe the odd pub) within walking distance of where people live. It's not a technical problem, it's a social problem.

>I am considering it entirely rationally. I believe that we should be investing more money into research that could save 30,000 lives every year.

With like $10,000,000 dollars for drugs and some infrastructure we could save FAR MORE than 30,000 people every year in impoverished countries.

And with not doing stuff like the BS Iraq embargo, we could save around 500,000 lives.

Just a quick comparison...

it engenders an entire host of benefits & pleasures

what is this host of pleasures? I get that some people enjoy driving. I loved it when I was a teenager, now I hate it. Most of my driving is done in traffic and I'd much rather read a book or take a nap insted of micromanaging my 20km/hr commute.

Not only would autonomous cars give me back my 1.5hrs/day that is dead time... but the roads would be incredibly more safe.

And for people who like to drive... how about a racetrack?

The greatest pleasure I get from the roads - on my scooter :) - is from other traffic. Racetracks are a different kind of fun, for when you want to go fast and corner hard.

I get that you get pleasure from driving or riding and if it's anything like my experience (in my teens) a good part of it is the danger factor. I drove like a lunatic when I was 16 (just like most other 16 year olds) and it was great fun at the time. Now when I look back I can see what kind of an idiot I was for putting others and myself in that kind of mortal danger.

That's not to say that you can't enjoy driving responsibly. But there's so much unnecessary danger and tedium involved that it seems a no-brainer to move to a computer controlled future.

It's actually less danger factor than it is the pleasure of competence, doing something well and smoothly. I live in London, where there are a lot of powered two-wheelers, filtering is legal, and it's just about the best way of getting from A to B in the congested city. Sure, it gets slightly more dangerous if you get into a bit of a race with someone else - the adrenaline of competition can push you a bit, but you're mostly just a risk to yourself.

But being able to skip past long queues of stopped or slowly moving traffic, safely and efficiently almost as if the traffic didn't exist, feels really good.

Honestly, I think inner city scooters don't really factor into this debate. As you mention you pose a limited risk to others and your choice to risk your own well being is exactly that- your choice.

2000kg passenger cars travelling at 60-100km/hr are another story altogether. My guess is that there would be a tiny fraction (<1%) of all road fatalities caused by purely mechanical failure. That leaves 99% (stats pulled from my ass) caused, or largely contributed to, by human error. For a large class of these errors a computer would never cause the problem or safely navigate around it.

Saying "I want to keep driving 'cos its fun!!" isn't really good enough in that context.

FWIW, it's not really an inner-city scooter - at 300cc, top speed about 140km/h, it's well capable of touring, and I have toured on it.

But even if it was, it seems to me that you're assuming a boundary where none exists. There is no fixed point in the road where it's suddenly urban vs suburban vs rural; the most marked points are entry and exit to motorways, but they have lower per-mile risks already.

I'd be the first guy to say that 2000+kg cars ought to be move more safely and predictably; I'm a committed biker, and that would be safer for me too. But in the chaos of UK traffic, I don't really see how it's workable without converting everything - absolutely everything, pretty much overnight - to automated vehicles.

I mean the streets have one lane most of the time, but occasionally two or more lanes between certain traffic lights, junctions are not regular, roadworks at some point in your journey are statistically almost certain, pedestrians are always wandering out into the road, wobbly cyclists, etc. The only way I can see an automated vehicle working in that environment is one that moves unacceptably slowly to mitigate the risk of tort suits against the manufacturer; or an entirely separate road network, strictly for automated vehicles.

It would be interesting to know the injury/fatality stats for the kind of roads you're describing. If the rates are high (relatively speaking) then I would argue that yes a total conversion to computer controlled driving (when available) is the only socially acceptable thing to do. Public safety would trump your personal enjoyment of the act of riding.

Realistically speaking though truly autonomous driving in tricky (even for humans) conditions like you describe is probably a long way off, although within our lifetimes I would think. The other option is a total rethink of the city/suburb nightmare that we now live in. But that's a debate for another time :)

In the UK, most fatal accidents for car occupants are in rural roads - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/9399135/Quiet-rural... - "68 per cent of fatalities in 2010". But pedestrian accidents are predominantly (86%) in urban areas - http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.dft.g... .

Um, you must be joking. Frame it like an opponent would who is running for political office against you in the year 2050. So you're saying take away people's privilege to operate a vehicle they own and paid for with their own money? You want to require people to use an automated machine that, in theory, the state could over-ride the controls of at any moment? You want to eliminate all jobs associated with commercial driving (buses, delivery trucks, etc.) many of which are union jobs?

No. No. No.

Also, the answer to the danger & death problem is well understood -- you simply require people to first accumulate several dozen hours behind the wheel, under supervised instruction, with training for emergency situations, just like we do now with pilots licenses. The fact that this hasn't happened yet in the US (like it has in say, Germany) should show you what a political impossibility what you're saying really is.

P.S. For added hilarity, the story directly below this one on HN is about cell phone tracking, where the top post is all talk of going without cell phones because the device's tracking could infringe on people's freedom.

Which is the scarier dystopia? Your phone keeps a running tab on your location, which could be accessed by the state or Google? Or your mode of transportation is tracking you, _and can be over-ridden or disabled at any time by the state or by Google_...

I'm FAR more frightened of being t-boned by a drunk driver than of big brother taking control of my car. Honestly can't tell if you are trolling or serious.

Then you'll love the MS AutoCar 2020.

It has a top of the line electronic routing OS, designed by Visual Basic veterans.

I was seriously trolling, also known as taking an idea to its logical extreme to make a point.

You're presenting a false choice here. There's lots of other ways to attack the drunk driving problem without taking everyone's drivers licenses away and banning normal driving, as the OP was advocating.

Ok I see what you were getting at now but I still don't agree with your conclusions and here's why:

1. Anti-drink driving campaigns and counter measures don't work. People make the choice to drive while drunk when their decision making powers are at their worst.

2. The issue with human controlled driving goes far deeper than just DUI. The fact is that we're (collectively) just not very good at it. Even if you are the best, most cautious most defensive driver there's nothing you can do about some idiot running a red light because he was adjusting his stereo. Your perfect driving record is intact but you're dead anyway.

3. The chance of being injured or killed while driving are astronomically higher than the chance of big brother having the motive/inclination to want to remotely control your car (although I might feel differently if I lived in Syria - even then this is getting really close to tinfoil hat territory).

The way I see it computer controlled cars shouldn't be seen as curtailing freedoms, rather as relieving us from tedium and making us safer.

I don't think your point 1 is as true as you think it is. Anti-drink driving campaigns seem to work: http://www.thecommunityguide.org/mvoi/massmedia_ajpm.pdf describes studies that identified significant (>15%) reductions in alcohol related accidents, with economic payoffs during the campaigns of more than 20x.

That's certainly a LOT better than I would have thought, although still depressingly short of the 100% reduction that computer controlled cars would give us.

I doubt we'd see a 100% reduction of accident injuries and fatalities with automated control of cars - diminishing returns due to other uncontrolled factors like pedestrians, dropped loads, pathological algorithm responses in unusual situations etc. Of course, spending 6x as much on road-safety campaigns as in the referenced studies won't deliver anything like a 6x improvement either.

It's easy to think of the political obstacles if you are expecting this to happen overnight. But it will be gradual. People will share the road with robots for a while, and when it's clear how much safer the robots are, there will start to be roads and then areas where people aren't allowed to drive. As for "tak[ing] away people's privilege to operate a vehicle they own and paid for," they can feel free to drive on private property. Even today I'm not allowed to drive my off-road truck on public roads because it doesn't have proper smog equipment and mudflaps, and I own and paid for it with my own money. It's really not that unreasonable when it's a matter of public safety and the restrictions only apply to public roadways.

As for the automation stealing jobs argument, that's a whole 'nother can of worms.

try to take away my motorcycle and i'll buy a gun.

seriously, what's wrong with you? individual mobility is a great freedom and source of happiness. i like to be able to control a machine, drive it up a mountain. i've spent months driving all across the US, Europe and places like Iceland. best experiences ever, every single turn was a choice by me.

the minute you make every thing super safe people will kill themselves out of boredom.

but i guess you're one of those people that want to ban drugs, sugar, fat, knifes, flight, compilers and anything with sharp edges.

and your numbers, oh scary, TEN 9/11s. maybe all that shows us that on a historic scale, 9/11 wasn't that big? how many people got wiped out on D-Day? By the Spanish Flu?

It seems the most knee-jerk reactions always come from bike riders (buy a gun.. really?) :)

How about the upside. Every bike rider I've ever talked to bitches about stupid "cage drivers". Imagine if every 4 wheeler was autonomous.. no more bitching, you'd be able to zig-zag between them easily, and if you do happen to lose concentration for a moment you can rest assured that a computer will (probably) stop before it kills you.

the minute you make every thing super safe people will kill themselves out of boredom.

Really? You think people would kill themselves because they no longer had to manually do one of the most boring, repetitive, tedious everyday things they have to do? Personally I'd read a book.

This is ridiculous. You're seriously suggesting that you're going to shoot your way to mobility :) I'm assuming that's just some macho bullshit because it's insane.

What you're not realizing is that it's often not the person causing the accident that gets hurt, the idea of making something as tedious as driving automated is that it's safer for everyone.

Drugs already are banned. The ones you're most likely talking about are anyway. And the reason is because they fuck people up.

How about people do something productive with their lives instead of taking drugs, developing diabetes from sugar, overweight from fat, and kill people with large heavy steel motorized machines?

You can try to belittle 30,000 people but if you stop cleaning your guns to think about it long enough you might actually appreciate that all those people probably didn't want to die from theirs and other people's driving mistakes.

i said i'd buy one, not that i have one.

and yes, i believe in every adults right to fuck him or herself up. if i want to exercise, let me. if i enjoy fatty food, let me. if i enjoy driving my car, let me.

and why do i need to be productive? who says that? life is short, why be "productive" all the time? how about some fun, self-indulgence and mindless games?

we already have rules to protect the general population, way too many in certain areas, far too less in others. speeding is forbidden, pot as well - but areas like finance are wide open.

how about focusing the efforts of banning things on stuff that impact millions, at the same time rather than stuff that will hurt me and maybe a few folks around me? is that line of thinking too European? does everything in the US that might lead to unproductive, un-puritan fun be banned? nudity, foul language,...how dare people do that?

Well first off, you're talking to a European, and while I'm sympathetic to the fear of the encroaching 'nanny state', I just don't share your solution (guns)

If you want to get yourself fucked up then you're most likely quite happy to have the rest of society bear the burden of your subsequent health care, ditto for your diabetes care etc. I'm sure you get what I'm trying to say.

None of us live on an island, our actions impact others and when it does so (as Spock said) the needs of the many outweigh the needs if the few.

This country (America) is already being financially crippled by health care costs so reducing sugar and fat and car accidents seems to make perfect sense, even at the cost of a few's peoples' adrenaline fixes.

I don't disagree with you on Spanish flu (50m people died), or on the corrupt financial system, but that's a fragile house of cards. Economics is a complex system and it's all based on a mutual agreement in the value of little pieces of paper. It's a social contract that is holding together the fabric of capitalism. While that night not be the perfect system, it's so far the least bad that we've found.

"why do you need to be productive" - maybe I came across as being a little self righteous (which is far from the truth), I was just trying to say that one persons fun is very often a ton is work for the rest of society, those that scrape up the parts after a motorcycle accident, those that provide health care and those of us (all of us) that pay for it in our insurance premiums. Why should I, someone who is fit and healthy pay for everyone else's indulgence in fat and sugars that bought about heart disease and diabetes. The answer of course is that same one that is the reason why fixing cars safety is important, because the individual sometimes has to sacrifice something for the success of the rest of society.

Personally, I'm all in favor of having (potentially dangerous) outlets for people to have fun controlling machines and driving them up mountains. I would just rather those outlets were separate from, say, people's means of getting to work in the morning.

Oh, and as for priorities: the cost of eliminating danger from traffic to where it is "trivial" or "absent" probably isn't financially viable. Meaning you'd have to spend an inordinate amount of money for ever slimmer returns.

If you follow how rules and regulations aimed at making traffic more secure over time you'll notice that the incremental improvements are becoming smaller and smaller. In most sensible jurisdictions, the important, big stuff that saves lots of lives is in place and people are now bickering over the little stuff that is perhaps going to same a small number of people. Or, in many cases, won't save a single person, might even cause more accidents, but generates more revenue.

If you want to analyze something in terms of value to society you'll have to be prepared for a lot of unpleasant aspects.

That's how we improve the society: not by improving individuals, but taking away responsibilities from them. What comes next? People destroy their health eating crap, so we just plug them into feeding tubes?

There are many benefits to self-driving cars, and sure, security may be one of them, but don't delude yourself thinking you can solve all societies chores by restraining what people can do. People still smoke, even though it's known to be harmful. People do stupid sh. Neither technology or regulation are substitutes to wisdom.

Yes and we will have flying cars.

Except we won't. Because flying cars is called "aviation" and aviation brings new dimensions of "hard" in addition to a third spatial dimension. And truly self driving cars that require no dynamic input from humans at any time is something we'll get asymptotically closer to, but will never quite achieve except in relatively specialized cases.

This is what I believe. I can't prove it, but it is what my gut feeling tells me.

And why would you want to? Of course, for typical highways it is obvious that it would probably be both faster and safer to have some sort of mandatory cooperative autonomous mode, but even that will be hard to achieve. I've met some of the people who work on developing and standardizing certain inter-car protocols to solve these types of problems. Most of the people I've met are neither brilliant nor capable. For the most part they illustrate to me a) how hard the problem is at scale (ie. get all manufacturers onboard) b) there will be a lot of idiots involved in this which means it'll take an awful lot of time to even come up with even baseline systems for proper crash-avoidance -- nevermind the real-time dynamic systems for controlling masses of fast-moving vehicles.

I've come to realize that autonomous cars are a pre-req for flying cars. Obvious now that I see it, of course. Humans as a whole can't possibly handle flying machines when they have so much trouble with cars.

I'm skeptical about totally autonomous cars, but I think freeway driving will be increasingly automated. Thrun has said that he's let his car drive him from the bay area to Reno several times. I assume he's exaggerating a bit, but probably not by much. It's a solvable problem for good road conditions.

Right on!

There is no way a mass market for personal air vehicles can happen if we need traditional pilot's licences. Following the eventual success of driverless cars, one can imagine that all-weather PAVs will not require a license because we will just be passengers.

See: http://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2004/july/ts_sf...

Your argument allows for certain driverless cars in which a human is present to provide dynamic input for situations that require it. This is currently the legal requirement in Nevada.

Admitting that driverless cars cannot be truely perfected, does not preclude mass adoption - because they merely need to be safer and cheaper to operate than the current human-only traffic situation. I think we are less than a decade away from that tipping point. Does anyone else agree?

I would be careful to conclude without data. For instance insurance companies have data that suggests that systems for warning the driver of lane drift make cars significantly more likely to have accidents. I can't remember if they had figured out why, but this is the sort of counter-intuitive results you have to expect when you are dealing with a field that isn't adequately understood.

And large populations of autonomous cars in obviously something we have zero experience with so we can't really know if there will be unexpected dominant factors.

Yes and we will have flying cars.

The flying cars argument is silly. Yes it was a fanciful 1950s dream that never made it to reality... however autonomous flight is real.. a good portion of commercial air flight is done under autopilot (including landings).

We never even got close to flying car tech... but saying that truly self driving cars that require no dynamic input from humans at any time is something we'll get asymptotically closer to, but will never quite achieve is silly, we're already very close to this reality. I'd be very surprised if in 10 years we don't have a completely computer controlled car.

Why is it silly? Consider this: we've had autopilots for many, may years. But even very limited gadgetry such as automatic parking is a very recent development in cars. And that is an almost trivial scenario.

(The reason the flying car won't be a reality is that all of those (auto-piloted) air planes do in fact have a crew of 1-3 highly qualified professionals -- and the flying cars would be piloted by the sort of people who can't figure out roundabouts. Also, the density of planes is extremely low compared to what would be the situation if flying cars were commonplace).

Also, planes have maintainance regimes that are vastly different from your car. I bet that you did not go through a checklist when you got into your car this morning, nor when you parked it. You probably do not have the faintest idea how the fluids are doing. You probably don't even know if all the external lights work. It is highly unlikely that you even performed the most rudimentary tests of all before getting into your car: walking around it and kicking the tyres. There was no qualified and certified mechanic (for your specific model) to go over your car prior to setting off.

All of this is true.. however you categorically stated that we "will never quite achieve" totally autonomous cars. To me that sounds like a silly statement especially when compared to flying cars (a totally different class of problem).

The fact is that we're very quickly edging towards fully computer controlled cars. You have to have a truly limited imagination to think we will never get there.

The argument about airplane maintenance also doesn't hold water. Result of a malfunctioning plane: plunge 30,000ft and hundreds dead. Result of a malfunctioning car: coast to a gentle stop. See any difference?

I was being imprecise. Sorry about that. I don't think that we will see totally autonomous cars _in_our_lifetime. "Never" is not a useful timescale.

  You have to have a truly limited imagination to think we
  will never get there.

40 years ago people did the same sorts of extrapolations on air-travel and figured that 15-20 years later all commercial air travel would be supersonic. And why wouldn't they? Orville Wright was still alive when the first supersonic flight took place. We went from not being able to fly heavier-than-air machines to breaking the sound barrier in 43 years. But of course, that didn't happen.

And in just the past few years we've gone backwards. There is currently no supersonic passenger jet in service.

A lot of domains appear to exhibit the same asymptotic behavior. Space travel, medicine, AI etc. Domains where initial speed causes undue optimism and where we later suffer regressions. (No regressions in medicine you say? Well, how about the crazy anti-vaccination people and the re-emergence of diseases that were practically eradicated?)

I build stuff, I program stuff, I occasionally build and race cars. I don't think my skepticism stems from _lack_ of imagination -- I think it has more to do with an abundance of imagination.

  The argument about airplane maintenance also doesn't hold water. Result of a
  malfunctioning plane: plunge 30,000ft and hundreds dead. Result of a
  malfunctioning car: coast to a gentle stop. See any difference?

I'm sorry, but that is pure nonsense and many, many, many people pay the ultimate price to prove you wrong every day.

I don't think that we will see totally autonomous cars _in_our_lifetime

Now you're moving the goalposts to suit your argument.

Supersonic flight was abandoned because it is expensive and prohibitively noisy. Will some set of obstacles also arise to stymie autonomous vehicles? Maybe, but we wont know till we try.

The regression in medicine is due to pure stupidity. Will the same or similar type of stupidity raise its head to block self-driven cars? Again the answer is maybe. Maybe not. We wont know till we've tried.

many, many, many people pay the ultimate price to prove you wrong every day

You misunderstood what I said. My point was that if a computer controlled car's computer fails it can be made to fail-safe. Shut down and coast to a stop. The same cant be said for planes.

Of course we will have scenarios of computers being mis-programmed and causing death. The point being that once a bug is found and eliminated it wont reoccur. Not to mention that a human will never drive as well or recover from trouble (such as a fishtail) as well as a computer. Our interfaces are simply too slow, clumsy, prone to fatigue, prone to mis judgement due to adrenaline etc. the list goes on.

I get what you're saying about optimistic extrapolation being a trap... but we don't have to extrapolate far from where we are today. The google self driven cars have already driven tens of thousands of miles with the only recorded accident occurring when the vehicle was under human control.

Not only that but Nevada has already licensed the cars for testing on its roads. Now you can argue that the testing is not 100% authentic. From what I understand the routes are pre-programmed and 2 occupants must be in the car at all times. But to say that this tech wont go anywhere for the next 50-60 years (however long you intend to live :) ) ... seems to lack imagination.

This isn't everyone using personal jet-packs or interstellar travel we're talking about here.

> You misunderstood what I said. My point was that if a > computer controlled car's computer fails it can be made to > fail-safe. Shut down and coast to a stop. The same cant be > said for planes.

Just because you are at ground-level you are not safe if you lose control of the vehicle.

> The point being that once a bug is found and eliminated it > wont reoccur.

We already have a software industry and we know that this doesn't happen: bugs do not occur only once and then get eliminated forever. There are people making a living writing books about mistakes that people repeat over and over in software.

"There is currently no supersonic passenger jet in service."

The dream isn't dead yet:

http://www.aopa.org/aircraft/articles/2012/120426back-to-a-s...

Some benefits of self-driving cars only come in when they hit certain market-shares. For highway driving there are big gains when you have enough for a dedicated lane, and when cars can "draft" one another, but the biggest gain will be in cities when (if) we get to 100%.

At that point we can do away with all traffic lights except for pedestrian crossings. Not only will stop signs be unnecessary, cars could approach intersections at speed, knowing that there was a gap in the cross-traffic for them to fit through. If you let a single human-driven car onto those streets you couldn't implement anything like that, though.

I'm not sure they'll be phased out entirely. What happens when all electrical systems go out. What do we do about inclement weather, system malfunctions. What do we do about classic cars (as in people like owning cars from decades ago). What about driving on unimproved roads (in the country). I think in urban areas and developed areas this is feasible, but I think there are some scenarios where it may not happen for a long time.

Why don't we now have self-driving trains/subways? They move on rails but we keep insisting they must be supervised by people in the vehicle (with a few exceptions like people movers at airports and amusement parks, etc).

The metro in Copenhagen is completly autonomous.

The yurikamome in Tokyo is self driving

> What happens when all electrical systems go out. What do we do about inclement weather, system malfunctions.

You could ask the same questions about human-driven cars. When the stoplights don't work and there's ice over all the roads, sensible people stay off the roads, and people with a death wish go out for a spin.

Wait, what? No stoplights and ice on the road - that's like 1/3 of the year here in Finland. All you have to do is adjust to the environment and you are able to get from a place to another.

In a city, with 10-20% grade practically everywhere? Yeah it's passable in flatlands or sparsely populated areas, but frankly automatic cars aren't really going to be any worse than humans at traversing bad conditions, so an impassable road for an automatic car would be impassable also for a human driver.

Damn this European smugness gets on my nerves so much for some reason.

If you have these driving conditions 1/3 of the year 1) Finnish drivers grow up learning how to handle it because they have to, 2) most if not all of your cars have 4 wheel drive and ice-capable tires.

That is not the case here. Those driving conditions are rare.

I'll chime in with the DLR (Docklands Light Railway) in London is self-driving for the most part.

The DLR is slow, very slow, and services are fairly spaced out. I want automation for safety, speed and much higher capacity used on the infrastructure.

At least one Paris metro line (ligne 1?) has been automated, and it's faster and more frequent than most of the other lines there - at least that's my anecdotal experience from two weeks ago.

I've always thought a simple way to improve the process would be to require people to volunteer 200 hours in an Accident and Emergency ward at their local hospital.

force us to spend time with people who found out what thousands of pounds of metal does to the human body when it decelerates quickly.

I think there will be two nice outcomes:

1. Lots of people will chose not to get a license (and will probably avoid cars altogether).

2. The people that do get licenses will drive with a lot more care and respect.

Alternatively, we could require them to ride along with accident investigators on the police force, because police officers are well known for their careful, respectful driving.

accident investigators != police officers behind the wheel. You probably know this, but still had to make an awesome comment about it?

It's funny how some people really think that self-driving cars are a bad thing, automation is a bad thing and people should be kept in labor. Yet, the same excact people, "optimize" their workflows by automating things, writing scripts, making the machines do as much as possible because there's no human-errors, it's cheap and it's very fast.

I really don't see (consumer)cars having no steering wheels, pedals or any other conrol equipment. What I see is cars gradually(within the next 5-10 years and onwards) get more and more of technologies to assist and aid with driving, ultimately resulting in a vehicle to which you can just say the address, and it will get you there. And yes, you'll still need a driving license for driving such a vehicle for decades, even if you don't expicitly take any control over the driving process.

For some it's an awesome future, for some it's a nightmare.

I've worked in an Emergency Room. Literally every single person who worked there drove a car. Both trauma surgeons were motorcycle enthusiasts. I'm friends with pulmonologists who smoke, psychiatrists who drink, endocrinologists who are fat.

Having seen the possible consequences of a bad decision first-hand does not, in fact, stop people from making bad decisions.

> Having seen the possible consequences of a bad decision first-hand does not, in fact, stop people from making bad decisions.

For certain personality types.

Are you saying if 16 year olds were forced to work with rehab patients, a good percentage of them would not be scared away from driving?

I'm not talking in hypotheticals here. I'm saying that of the many, many people I know who do in fact work closely with the badly injured victims of traffic accidents every day, not a single one has been scared away from driving.

A lot of people drive without a license.

This is the way things work in south africa. Gettting a license is really, really difficult and expensive, so people don't do it.

Lots of people choose to break the law every day.

How we punish those people is a separate matter.

I tried to upvote you but accidentally hit downvote. Sorry.

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