‘Human Driving Association, an organization aiming to protect people’s freedom of movement and right to drive their own cars.’
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I’m too old to have a dog in this fight, it won,t happen in my lifetime. I would guess that a government that thinks that it should require you to wear a seat belt, or a motorcycle helmet will have no qualms about forcing you to let a robocar do the driving. I am not saying that seat belts or motor cycle helmets are bad, just that I don’t like the idea that a nanny government has a duty or right to save us from ourselves.
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I skim read the article, cliff note version? I got we got no idea.
Awwww S#%^ here we go… I would definitely be a proponent of my right to drive…and just for giggles I will go all Stone Age n such with a 70’ GMC Pickup or something, throw my iphone out the window and go for a real non tracked ride in an automobile or truck to a non disclosed location to do none of your business…
I’m beginning to become a Luddite…
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Honestly, while I would love it if people were afforded the responsibility to drive themselves, I look around at the drunk, high, texting, aggressive, tailgaiting, etc drivers that over-fill the roadways and…
America has a very backwards notion of rights. We are not born with rights. Some god or universal architect does not bequeath rights upon us. All we have are privileges allowed us by those in charge. If the government tomorrow decided to toss the 1st amendment, then it would be gone (and this has already happened; See “free speech zones”).
In most cases the government taking rights away is a travesty. In others, however… Put it this way. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. If you are hurting others with your “rights,” then you must be stopped. And unfortunately, drivers as a whole show little interest in driving safely. Distracted, impaired, and unsafe driving is a growing problem and it will only get worse as mobile technology gets better and people continue to lose interest in driving as an activity itself rather than merely as a chore you have to do to get from one place to another.
In short, we are going to stupid ourselves right out of the privilege of driving. When the machines take over and we are forbidden from regaining control, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
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+1
In just one day (yesterday), I witnessed the following:
A moving van plowing past a red light, at least 5 seconds after the light turned red.
A VW Golf veering from center lane, to the right lane, and then immediately into the left lane–in heavy expressway traffic. This reckless young dude may have “moved up” about 3 car spaces by cutting other drivers off–in 3 different lanes.
A moron in a Camry who believed that it is appropriate to stop and to obstruct traffic on a road when a bus (a commuter bus, NOT a school bus) is stopped on the shoulder to pick up passengers.
An oblivious jerk in a pickup truck who pulled out of a strip mall, directly into my path.
While I was driving on a local road slightly above the speed limit, I was being tailgated by a young woman who was apparently texting while she drove. She was so close that I had a bird’s eye view of her and her actions.
Could self-driving cars do any worse?
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We split from England with this message to the King.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”
Natural rights are not an American invention but were postulated as far back as the early 1400’s.
The Declaration of Independence defines how we as a nation decided to break from England to create our Constitution and are codified in the Bill of Rights. Those privileges given to us may be allowed by those in charge but should be guided by the Constitution. If they are not upheld, it is the people’s right and responsibility to remove those in power by vote or by force.
Driving is a privilege. Freedom of movement is a natural right. There will be friction.
You can make the argument that lousy drivers endanger your rights to safe passage so should lose their rights to control their own vehicles. They might not have killed anyone with their car but they are likely to because they are a lousy driver. To me, this is the same as imprisoning a person before they commit a crime just because odds are they will.
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What the… 
? 
CSA
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Strikes me as silly and someone has too much time on their hands. We are very far away from reliable autonomous vehicles, ignore the hype from Tesla. The odds of federal government, hmmm it is the state governments that issue driving licenses, not the federal government.
Dave:
Open the pod bay doors, please, HAL?
HAL:
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Dave:
HAL, I won’t argue with you any more! Open the doors!
HAL:
Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose any more. Goodbye.
We are in the early developmental years of AI, Artificial Intelligence, but I can see a day coming when the robots launch a Robot Driving Association to protect their right to drive your car.
CSA
If drivers are willing to up their game, increasing the standards to get and keep a driver’s license while facing the scrutiny that would make the roads safer for everyone, I will defend their so-called “right to drive.” Those drivers don’t pose a threat to me or my loved ones.
The problem is that it’s far too easy to get a license, and the penalties for negligence behind the wheel aren’t harsh enough. Adult drivers don’t even have to take a driver’s education class anymore in most states, they just have to pass a simple road test and written test. Motorcyclists, on the other hand, have to take an intensive course to get a motorcycle endorsement on their driver’s license, regardless of their age, and that motorcycle safety class tends to increase the odds they will operate their motorcycles safely and operate their cars more safely than before they took the class.
In lieu of increasing standards for getting and keeping a driver’s license, I favor autonomous cars because their use will make the rest of us who welcome increased scrutiny safer.
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Knowing what I know now, I regard that as hyperbole, because the Constitution came after the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution separates Church and State.
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I’ve had my motorcycle license forever, the only test I have taken in the last 45 years was when getting my cdl.
It could be that enough lobbying will get legislation enacted such that you can still drive your own car if you pass rigorous tests. Think something along the lines of what pilots have to do to be allowed to fly. But the bottom line is that as driving yourself becomes a hobby and not a necessity because machines will drive you anywhere you need to go, both the government and the public are going to get tired of people driving like morons, and start asking why people need to drive in the first place.
For the vast majority of people, cars are appliances that are used to get where they need to go. If a free chauffeur came with their car, they’d happily sit in the back and play with their phones for the whole journey. Well, eventually a robot chauffeur will come with the car and that’s exactly what they’ll do.
Really, public interest in people driving themselves will drop off a cliff once that happens. Cars will be a lot more like airplanes - only people who are really interested in the physical act of driving them will even want to learn how.
This isn’t hard. If our “rights” were given us by a god, then that god would have secured those rights for us and we wouldn’t have had to go to war with Britain to get them. They aren’t rights - they’re privileges that we secured by killing the people who didn’t want us to have them.
To that:
It’s important to remember that the man who wrote that owned slaves. And so did a large number of the men who signed on to it. And the country that was formed under that concept continued to allow people to own slaves for almost 100 years.
Those slaves had no “rights,” because rights don’t exist. Those slaves were not extended the privilege of being free because the people nattering on about all men having rights were full of crap and didn’t want to give it to them.
Everything we consider a “right” is something that was either kindly given to us by the people in charge or, more frequently. taken from the people in charge, often at gunpoint. We’d do well to remember that, because “rights” are tenuous things and if we don’t safeguard them, we will lose them. That goes for big concepts like speech or religion, as well as comparatively small ones like being allowed to drive your own car when a machine is perfectly capable of doing it.
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Many states aren’t grandfathering in people like you. You must be in one of the states that is.
That’s a good point. If your rights originate from an omnipotent deity who chooses not to enforce them, you might be worshiping a false god.
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It says “License,” but it’s just a tax. I’ve had a motorcycle endorsement for over half a century and am charged extra for it when I renew my Driver “License.”
A Driver License is for all practical purposes, a tax. I agree that an FAA model for licensing pilots should be applied to drivers. Students would need to study, possibly operating a vehicle, knowing laws, and learning a bit about navigation and weather from certified instructors.
After hours of driving with an instructor and a physical exam the student could receive a student permit, practice driving solo, take a comprehensive written exam and pass a thorough practical driving exam given by a certified examiner.
As anybody who’s gone through this process, involving flying, knows that this can be costly. Been there, done that. And not everybody passes.
I love the idea, considered it many times before, but can’t see it happening. People would start screaming about discrimination.
I like when I board an aircraft and know that the flight crew was discriminated against to be able to fly.
CSA
They don’t seem to be much closer to perfecting cars that drive themselves 100% of the time than they were a few short years ago.
You could even make the argument that they now have a clearer understanding of the issues that will be extremely difficult to conquer than they once had.
I’m not planning on worrying about a world where all vehicles on the road have the capacity to be fully self driving. It will be a long time coming.
You and I don’t tend to agree on very much, but I agree with this. All I have to do to renew my license from now until I die is show that I can read (or memorize) an eye chart and give the government some money. I’ve long thought that we should be retested at least every decade, with the clock starting immediately upon getting our first license.
You see a lot of talk about making old people re-test. Well, I see people in their 20’s and 30’s driving like morons on purpose. We should re-test them too, especially since you are on your best behavior and have not ingrained any bad habits when you take your on the road test in high school. Ten years later after you’ve gotten fully in the habit of driving like an idiot, it’ll be harder to fake it on the test.
I also think there should be a basic medical evaluation done at test time. Got clogged carotid arteries and black out from time to time? You absolutely should not be driving, yet my great grandma kept her license for 20 years after her first episode of that. She finally stopped driving voluntarily after she blacked out and hit a farmer’s bull shortly before hitting the farmer’s barn. But she kept her license and was legally allowed to drive long after that incident.
Unfortunately, at least until cars can drive themselves and almost everyone stops caring about the issue, any politician who tries to push this idea through is guaranteed to be voted out of office at the next election, so it’ll never happen until it doesn’t matter anyway.
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Apparently the process of getting a driver’s license in Germany is something like what you suggest. As a result, some Germans come to the US and get a driver’s license here, then get an International license here, then go home and drive in Germany.
On another point, it’s interesting to see people invoking religious beliefs to support their arguments about the “right” to drive. And, let’s be clear. In addition to clearly and deliberately excluding slaves from the definition of “all men”, those same inspired founding fathers had no problem excluding Native Americans, and later Asians when they first noticed they existed, and of course the entire half of the population that was female. So the founders, in their conversations with the Creator, must have learned that the Creator only was concerned with the equality of white men. Shall we argue that only white men have a “right” to drive?
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