New Book Recommends Regulators take a Proactive Approach to Driverless Cars
In their new book, Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead, Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman state that government must expend considerable resources in crafting meaningful regulation:
A driverless license is a good start, but a significant amount more research and exploration of regulatory oversight is needed. Ideally, the highest levels of the government should adopt a proactive, rather than reactive, approach. For example, legal experts need to examine and possibly revamp liability laws to clarify who, exactly, is at fault in a driverless accident. Car insurance will need to be similarly restricted. Legislators will need to decide how safe is safe enough for a car to drive without a human at all, and how safety should be tested. Although these challenges of governance are entirely solvable, as they remain unaddressed, human-driven cars will continue to reap their grisly harvest in the form of lives lost, time wasted and polluting fuel burned.
