This got me thinking, how does a police officer tell a self driving vehicle to pull over? Or do they have to pull out the road strips? Does the car just keep going when it's been disabled? Do they have to do a bump turn?
How do they react and get out of the way of an emergency vehicle?
Exactly. The biggest impediment is going to be insurance and liability. What do you think it will cost to insure a robotic driving vehicle? On whom does the liability fall in the case of an accident – the owner, or the manufacturer?
It will likely cost less to insure self driving systems. Especially over time. It won't get ever get drunk, it won't get tired. It will be less likely to operate a vehicle that is in disrepair, it will be less likely to operate a vehicle in weather it can't cope with. It won't be in a hurry. It won't be eating. It will learn from mistakes made by other self driving systems.
It's also pretty likely that whatever framework develops to license the systems will address liability (I think by requiring the operator of record to insure the vehicle).
It is unclear how the existing insurance system will translate to a future where all liability is concentrated on the manufacturer. Currently major fatal accidents often result in bankruptcies and may even incur criminal charges. They are not fully covered by insurance.
All precedent is that auto manufacturers are responsible for manufacturing defects that lead to injury or death, not the owner or driver. Even the term "operator of record" has new meaning in the fully autonomous era. Bottom line if software bugs cause injury it's the software writers that are responsible.
You mention many problems with human drivers. But software has been known to have bugs too, and the world is an almost infinitely complex learning environment. It is most likely that the safer future will involve the intersection and mutual augmentation of these two control systems, not the swift replacement of one by the other. As is the case for example with aircraft.
Even if fully insured, most policies have a limit under $100k/person. The really serious accidents result in millions of dollars in damages (especially when lawsuits are involved). What would have been isolated to a personal backruptcy is now concentrated on the autonomous auto manufacturer.
As for criminal charges, the key question is whether a bad bug can constitute negligence. That will no doubt be tested in courts when lives have been lost.
Even if fully insured, most policies have a limit under $100k/person.
What does 'fully insured' mean here? A sensible approach is to have liability coverage sufficient to protect your assets. That might be a lot more coverage than the legal minimum, but a large personal umbrella policy might be hundreds of dollars a year. People go bankrupt because they skimp on insurance, not because it is onerously expensive.
> What does 'fully insured' mean here?... People go bankrupt because they skimp on insurance
Not necessarily. Even "large" policies will not protect your assets from the worst cases where damages run into the millions of dollars, e.g. where you kill a family or hospitalize someone for months.
You propose that everyone with coverage less than "sufficient to protect your assets" is guilty of being "under insured". But there is no amount of coverage you can pre-determine to protect your assets in all possible cases. Not unless you purchase a policy with no upper limit -- but those are rare in the auto insurance world.
Thus, even if you have a "large" policy that falls on the high end of typical coverage limits, truly catastrophic cases often result in personal bankruptcies. Bankruptcy courts cap the payouts. There are no such caps on auto manufacturers responsible for accidents... unless they go bankrupt too.
I'm pretty skeptical that there are a large number of these huge claims. I tried looking for some info about it but it gets obscured by advertising for liability insurance.
I would expect many of the largest settlements to involve negligence like drunk driving or excessive speed (a system might have the wrong speed for a stretch of road, but it mostly will have accurate speeds). Of course there are also ways that a driving system could be implemented negligently that don't apply to a human driver (but I sort of expect the licensing process to address that).
The idea that a EULA will protect manufacturers from lawsuits over injury and death due to their error is complete hand wavy fantasy. No such precedent exists.
You need only look up the average cost of a major hospitalization to gauge what the at-fault party is responsible for. They can run into the millions.[1] That's before we even get to tort damages awarded by a court for things like negligence (and you're certainly right that those can be even higher).
By licensing I meant the state granting a license for the system to operate on public roads. It won't be individuals signing away their rights, it will be the state declaring what rights they have.
Also, I'm sure there are large claims. My contention is that there aren't a lot of them.
If they are really safer than human driven vehicles, then it will likely cost less to insure them than human driven vehicles. And as a higher percentage of vehicles become autonomous, the roads as a whole should get safer (assuming self driving cars are actually safer) and that will also lower insurance costs.
As for liability, there is already generally strict liability when products malfunction. If the product didn't malfunction, then that would mean someone else was at fault, and the cases where there was no malfunction and no one else at fault should be rare. Regardless, there's a huge body of law out there regarding product liability.
Once again, I'm assuming that autonomous vehicles deliver on the safety promises. If they become as safe as a lot of people think they can be, there will be so many fewer accidents that I don't think insurance and liability will be as big of an issue as they are now for human driven vehicles.
Robots in safety-critical applications are not new. Who do you sue if the fire alarm in your building fails to detect a fire? Who do you sue if the railroad crossing gates don't go down when a train is coming? Who do you sue when you're walking on the sidewalk, a bicyclist yells at a cab driver, the cab driver gets flustered, jumps the curb, and amputates one of your legs?
The answer is: it's complicated. That's why we have courts. We don't even have it sorted out for human drivers yet; if you kill someone with your car, you may get off without even a ticket, you may end up in prison for manslaughter. I honestly don't think robotic drivers add any complexity: there's already infinite complexity ;)
I don't believe there is any particular standard for this at the moment, and it likely on a list of special cases where the human "observer" takes over.
In general though, I don't think this is something that automated vehicles will have trouble with. Picking out strobing lights is pretty trivial for computer vision, and a couple of external microphones located on opposite sides of the vehicle would have an easy time localizing the direction of sirens even before the EV is in line-of-sight. I suspect eventually there will be some sort of preemption signal that EVs will be able to transmit that communicates their intended route to vehicles in their path.
I look forward to the day that I have a big ol' "get out of my way" button on the dashboard of my ambulance...
I look forward to the day that I have a big ol' "get out of my way" button on the dashboard of my ambulance...
I think I saw a light change on demand in my hometown (Wake County, NC) for an ambulance the other day. It was late at night with minimal traffic and the light had just turned red ahead of me. The ambulance was between me and the light and the light immediately cycled back to green as the ambulance approached. I'd never seen or heard of this before, but do you know whether emergency vehicles are now able to influence traffic signals?
Yep. A few people got busted for buying/selling the devices on Ebay a couple years ago. Not so legal to mess with traffic signals to speed up your commute -- damn tempting though.
In Cambridge, MA one of the local bus' has the power to keep a light green longer than normal with the same/similar system: http://pb.cambridgema.gov/1bus .
This is actually new to me. I thought that all of those systems just turn all the lights red. This automatically solves the problem of people playing with the system, or selling the dongles - only emergence vehicles can go through red, so it's pointless to use them.
Turning them red isn't terribly useful. As you point out, we can already drive through a red light after checking that approaching traffic has stopped.
By turning the light green, it allows cars that might otherwise be obstructing the intersection to proceed through it, clearing a path.
The same way they should react and get out of the way of a cyclist -- building a machine learning model of a police car with its lights and sirens on, and then making sure the car pulls over in that situation.
Sure but all the talk about cars on HN usually is about how ready for the road they are.
Also I don't think police are going to be too happy about a vehicle that is going to be probabilistic about pulling over. Nor would I really be happy about that in the back of an ambulance.
The DMVs need valid "reasons" to extract money. With human drivers, they can argue a database record must be maintained for traffic violations, a new license reissued every N years, etc. This is "plausible deniability", because there is no reason why it would cost tens of dollars per row in a database.
With self driving cars, plausible deniability goes away. There is no reason whatsoever. If the algorithm does not follow traffic laws, it won't be allowed on the road.
Another nice thing to notice: the DMV is double dipping. I mean, one fee for the self-driving car, another fee for the human behind the wheel, what a profitable operation! But why exactly? What kind of good services is it offering? None at all.
Self driving cars could mean the end of DMVs, and I would see that as a very good thing.
It's not $150 per vehicle. It's just $150. It's a permit for the company, not a license for the car.
Edit: It's very slightly more complicated. The human "drivers" in the car also have to be enrolled in the DMV's Employer Pull Notice program (which is a separate pre-existing program that basically lets employers keep track of the driving records of their drivers), and I believe the fee for that is $5. So it's basically pocket change for the company.
You have to pay vehicle registration fees every year. I don't see how this is all that different from that.
I can't imagine that $150 - even if it was per car, which it's not - even covers the overhead of ensuring that the company trying to test vehicles on public roads meets their minimum criteria. The requirements are pretty straightforward - following NHTSA guidance, insurance to cover injury/death, having a program in place to train drivers... this is the bare minimum responsible amount I would want these companies to be asked to do.
I pay more for a minimally-sized instance for a non-trafficked web app on DigitalOcean every year. Uber has no legitimate reason to not pay the fee, regardless of the validity. This is just a company attempting to "screw the Man", even though they are basically the peak representation of SV Man.
I really don't think they are doing it for the money, it is probably being done aso that they do don't have to disclose accidents, they don't even disclose self driving car % as per the article + they call out that Tesla doesn't require it, that's apples to oranges and the article also states that Tesla does have the permit.
It's not about paying $150, but about agreeing to additional regulation, which businesses generally don't want. Uber might actually prevail, since tech is the most vibrant sector in the Northern California economy and all the local politicians want a local company, not one in Michigan, to bring this tech to fruition.
Edit: I don't understand the downvotes. I'm not saying that regulation is bad, just that businesses are generally anti-regulation. I'm also not saying that the California DMV should or should not regulate self-driving cars, just that the government might give them a pass.
I imagine restauranteurs who welcome food safety regulations may do so out of a genuine desire for the restaurant business not to sicken the public.
I also imagine light-industry manufacturers who welcome pollution controls would do so out of regard for people and families living nearby.
In fact, I think there's probably significant amounts of regulation that would be non-controversial to business owners, and not merely intended to "keep out fresh competition".
If a business is welcoming such regulation, it's probably already doing it right and trying to keep out the competition that's undercutting them by doing it dangerously. Really, if a restaurant owner didn't want his customers getting sick, he'd give them hygienic food without the need for any regulation.
Well, you are running a restaurant right? There must be some balance and regulations are too easy to exploit both ways. As you well know, there are many toilets cleaner than some food places and yet they passed the regulations at some time. I would not want to have my name under a restaurant that runs that risk, while everyone games regulations and avoids the risk legally. If I pass regulations (at one particular moment in time), the insurance will cover damages; if it was the law I would go to prison/pay a high fine.
Flouting regulations doesn't mean that you will hurt anybody; you're not necessarily going to cause a large e-coli outbreak if you incorrectly store your meat, for example. But the point is that such risks are increased from a public health perspective – that's what regulations seek to prevent.
Waiting until someone becomes poisoned and using the legal system to fix the issue just seems bafflingly short-sighted.
What I am saying is that, here in Spain and probably elsewhere, the regulations are easy to game and when something happens you cannot use the law as you have a signed paper the place is up to spec.
>if a restaurant owner didn't want his customers getting sick, he'd give them hygienic food
Regulation merely enforces your assumption. Common sense to one can be revelation to another. You'd be surprised how many cheap food outlets skip basic hygenic procedures, such as washing produce before serving.
>I imagine restauranteurs who welcome food safety regulations may do so out of a genuine desire for the restaurant business not to sicken the public.
If that is the real reason then maybe, but for instance where I live it is doubtful that that is the only reason. There are so many rules we have to comply with as a restaurant that blatantly point to protection of big companies that go under the name 'satefy' that I for one do not welcome them at all. 1% of those rules would prevent to sicken the public, the rest is just to protect big booze, meat, fish etc vendors.
There are a whole bunch of food safety regulations. Most of these are good, and it's really pretty awesome that most of us can purchase and eat food from a restaurant without risking sickness. It's virtually certain that without these regulations there would be a race to the bottom.
You may want to update your confidence. Most of SE Asia has no hygiene laws for restaurants and yet tourists flock and rarely does anything terrible result.
Why would restaurant eating be a race to a bottom? It already can't compete on cost with cooking at home.
You mean something as humorous as people making ambitious, vague claims without any citation of supportive evidence?
Either way, here's my offering to your noble cause:
lofty and ambitious, your claim,
but if to convince others, your aim,
a citation you must provide
to support your allegation,
else others will quickly deride
that your claim has no fact for
foundation.
or
Credible Hulk has arrived
his face full of vexation
with utmost confidence, he insists
if to convince others, your aim
for that grand of a claim
you provide at least one damn citation
Went to over 100 restaurants across Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia and many didn't even have a sink for hand washing. Food vendors line street selling produce next to animals.
It's pretty obvious there are no enforced hygiene laws in any of those countries.
I think he wanted a citation on "rarely does anything terrible result".
My experience living in a developing nation with little to no sanitation regulation: people there got sick regularly and accepted it as part of life, e.g. "don't get the frozen pre-made food from that market, it'll make you sick." And they said that it's common to get food poisoning a couple times a year. So, not a weekly occurrence, but not all that rare.
(I was living in a former Soviet republic for a little over a year, and became good friends with several people who'd lived there their entire lives.)
I can't remember when I last had food poisoning here in the U.S.
Laws are not something that corporations or citizens have to agree with. They apply regardless.
This is the equivalent of Uber deciding not to pay its federal taxes. Sure, it could concoct a theory that the corporate income tax "doesn't apply to Uber", and in theory there's a possibility that the IRS might somehow agree. In practice, however, there is none.
The major difference here is simply that the penalties for failing to pay taxes are well-defined and severe, while the penalties for failing to obtain a state permit for autonomous vehicle testing are not. Uber is betting on the eventual penalties for their (flagrant and straightforward) violation of these laws will end up being something they prefer over making the relevant disclosures required by the permit.
You're completely begging the question by comparing this to not paying taxes. Uber's argument (and they may be right) is they don't need to "pay taxes" under current law.
>Laws are not something that corporations or citizens have to agree with. They apply regardless.
That simplistic reductionism is not true. There are concepts of civil disobedience.[1] History has shown that many laws (e.g. copyright laws, sodomy laws, Jim Crow laws) are more like an ongoing dialogue/battle between the citizens and government for universal compliance. Other laws such as homocide seem more stable for straightforward compliance without controversy.
The DMV didn't write the autonomous vehicle laws -- they are interpreting it -- to their benefit. Likewise, Uber didn't write the law either, they are also interpreting it -- to their benefit.
Those 2 interpretations differ. I have no idea who is "more correct" in their interpretation. The DMV may have the last word and win. We don't know yet.
>This is the equivalent of Uber deciding not to pay its federal taxes.
No, the analogy is somebody disagreeing with a government agency's interpretation of the law. An example would be a taxpayer who disagreed with IRS and won the case.[2]
It's similar to one entity claiming that early VCR users taping shows were "breaking the law."[3] If VCR consumers and Sony disagree and say it's "fair use", responding to that with "copyright laws apply to everybody regardless" doesn't actually analyze the differing interpretations. Eventually, the consumers and Sony got the Supreme Court to agree with their interpretation by a very close 5-4 majority ruling.
No but you probably voted for someone who helped put those rules in place. (Or maybe you didn't, but the point is that we "hire" others by voting, to sweat the details)
To be frank, you'd probably be terrible at it. All of us would, if only because lots of rules and regulations deal with more nuance than anyone could be reasonably expected to understand, if they had to vote on everything. That's why we have government committees staffed with people to research this stuff. I wish I could be that involved in things, but there are real, complicated considerations at play, not just, "Hm, given the choice between these two paragraphs, I can pick one and everything will work out."
Self-driving functionality, at least for the time being, is a tool used by a human operator to achieve their objectives with regard to the vehicle. This is distinct from a vehicle with no driver, for which regulation is obviously necessary. It's no different from a pilot using autopilot. If someone wanted to make an unmanned passenger plane, there'd need to be huge regulatory changes (not saying it's necessarily a good idea), but pilots use autopilot all the time without great regulatory upheaval, because it's just a tool the pilot is using to fly the plane as they wish.
So long as a human operator is in control of, and responsible for, the vehicle, it shouldn't matter in particular what method they use to operate it.
Interesting choice of example, considering the relative level of regulation between the aviation and automotive industries.
The use of "autopilot" in aviation is not without controversy, and there are a number of schools of thought on the spectrum between "it saves lives" and "it dumbs down pilots and kills people". FWIW, the FAA at least requires a functioning autopilot (or "automatic altitude control system") when flying in RVSM airspace, or the altitude where most commercial jets fly, so regulation is on the side of automation here.
"any vehicle equipped with technology that has the capability of operating or driving the vehicle without the active physical control or monitoring of a natural person..." [1]
Seems like Uber is right as long as their cars can't function without drivers, which is probably true.
As in not turning the steering wheel or pushing the gas or break pedals? Because that sounds like what Uber's Self Driving car does. (Even on the promotional videos, the "drivers"/testers are not turning the steering wheel.
> without the active physical control or monitoring of a natural person...
Its the physical control OR monitoring of a human. Ubers cars may not require [human] active physical control, but it does require monitoring of a human and so this doesn't apply to Ubers cars.
Well, every single self-driving car bein tested requires the monitoring of a person. Google Self-Driving car for example. (And even Tesla has the permit)
I'm not sure why so many people here are ignoring Levandowski's stated reason for not applying for the permit / downvoting people who agree with him, without explaining why they think Levandowski's argument is incorrect. This isn't a case of them willfully disobeying a regulation, it's them disagreeing with the regulating agency about the interpretation of the regulation.
And this disagreement isn't a necessarily a bad thing; I think the regulation is unclear, and in such cases the only way to "clarify" it is to wait for the regulating body to sue you and have both sides present their arguments in court. (You can't just ask them to clarify it, as they have no obligation to respond).
92 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadShould have just opened the article with this.
How do they react and get out of the way of an emergency vehicle?
It's also pretty likely that whatever framework develops to license the systems will address liability (I think by requiring the operator of record to insure the vehicle).
All precedent is that auto manufacturers are responsible for manufacturing defects that lead to injury or death, not the owner or driver. Even the term "operator of record" has new meaning in the fully autonomous era. Bottom line if software bugs cause injury it's the software writers that are responsible.
You mention many problems with human drivers. But software has been known to have bugs too, and the world is an almost infinitely complex learning environment. It is most likely that the safer future will involve the intersection and mutual augmentation of these two control systems, not the swift replacement of one by the other. As is the case for example with aircraft.
How often is the driver in those cases under insured? I also wonder how often criminal charges pop up for drivers that weren't being negligent.
As for criminal charges, the key question is whether a bad bug can constitute negligence. That will no doubt be tested in courts when lives have been lost.
What does 'fully insured' mean here? A sensible approach is to have liability coverage sufficient to protect your assets. That might be a lot more coverage than the legal minimum, but a large personal umbrella policy might be hundreds of dollars a year. People go bankrupt because they skimp on insurance, not because it is onerously expensive.
Not necessarily. Even "large" policies will not protect your assets from the worst cases where damages run into the millions of dollars, e.g. where you kill a family or hospitalize someone for months.
You propose that everyone with coverage less than "sufficient to protect your assets" is guilty of being "under insured". But there is no amount of coverage you can pre-determine to protect your assets in all possible cases. Not unless you purchase a policy with no upper limit -- but those are rare in the auto insurance world.
Thus, even if you have a "large" policy that falls on the high end of typical coverage limits, truly catastrophic cases often result in personal bankruptcies. Bankruptcy courts cap the payouts. There are no such caps on auto manufacturers responsible for accidents... unless they go bankrupt too.
I would expect many of the largest settlements to involve negligence like drunk driving or excessive speed (a system might have the wrong speed for a stretch of road, but it mostly will have accurate speeds). Of course there are also ways that a driving system could be implemented negligently that don't apply to a human driver (but I sort of expect the licensing process to address that).
You need only look up the average cost of a major hospitalization to gauge what the at-fault party is responsible for. They can run into the millions.[1] That's before we even get to tort damages awarded by a court for things like negligence (and you're certainly right that those can be even higher).
[1] http://www.rslfunding.com/whats-the-average-car-accident-set...
Also, I'm sure there are large claims. My contention is that there aren't a lot of them.
As for liability, there is already generally strict liability when products malfunction. If the product didn't malfunction, then that would mean someone else was at fault, and the cases where there was no malfunction and no one else at fault should be rare. Regardless, there's a huge body of law out there regarding product liability.
Once again, I'm assuming that autonomous vehicles deliver on the safety promises. If they become as safe as a lot of people think they can be, there will be so many fewer accidents that I don't think insurance and liability will be as big of an issue as they are now for human driven vehicles.
The answer is: it's complicated. That's why we have courts. We don't even have it sorted out for human drivers yet; if you kill someone with your car, you may get off without even a ticket, you may end up in prison for manslaughter. I honestly don't think robotic drivers add any complexity: there's already infinite complexity ;)
It's going to be some time before both of them are reality.
In general though, I don't think this is something that automated vehicles will have trouble with. Picking out strobing lights is pretty trivial for computer vision, and a couple of external microphones located on opposite sides of the vehicle would have an easy time localizing the direction of sirens even before the EV is in line-of-sight. I suspect eventually there will be some sort of preemption signal that EVs will be able to transmit that communicates their intended route to vehicles in their path.
I look forward to the day that I have a big ol' "get out of my way" button on the dashboard of my ambulance...
I think I saw a light change on demand in my hometown (Wake County, NC) for an ambulance the other day. It was late at night with minimal traffic and the light had just turned red ahead of me. The ambulance was between me and the light and the light immediately cycled back to green as the ambulance approached. I'd never seen or heard of this before, but do you know whether emergency vehicles are now able to influence traffic signals?
edit: apparently so - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_signal_preemption
One such article: https://boingboing.net/2006/04/18/man-fined-50-for-usi.html
By turning the light green, it allows cars that might otherwise be obstructing the intersection to proceed through it, clearing a path.
Also I don't think police are going to be too happy about a vehicle that is going to be probabilistic about pulling over. Nor would I really be happy about that in the back of an ambulance.
The DMVs need valid "reasons" to extract money. With human drivers, they can argue a database record must be maintained for traffic violations, a new license reissued every N years, etc. This is "plausible deniability", because there is no reason why it would cost tens of dollars per row in a database.
With self driving cars, plausible deniability goes away. There is no reason whatsoever. If the algorithm does not follow traffic laws, it won't be allowed on the road.
Another nice thing to notice: the DMV is double dipping. I mean, one fee for the self-driving car, another fee for the human behind the wheel, what a profitable operation! But why exactly? What kind of good services is it offering? None at all.
Self driving cars could mean the end of DMVs, and I would see that as a very good thing.
Edit: It's very slightly more complicated. The human "drivers" in the car also have to be enrolled in the DMV's Employer Pull Notice program (which is a separate pre-existing program that basically lets employers keep track of the driving records of their drivers), and I believe the fee for that is $5. So it's basically pocket change for the company.
The PDF that lists that fee is the Employer Pull Notice Application Checklist (https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/1c4c241b-70be-45f3...).
I can't imagine that $150 - even if it was per car, which it's not - even covers the overhead of ensuring that the company trying to test vehicles on public roads meets their minimum criteria. The requirements are pretty straightforward - following NHTSA guidance, insurance to cover injury/death, having a program in place to train drivers... this is the bare minimum responsible amount I would want these companies to be asked to do.
I respect and admire their attempt to "screw the man."
To be honest, I don't really like Uber the company all that much. But I do appreciate their irreverent attitude towards meddling bureaucrats.
On principle, would you give a bully your lunch money? It's only $5...
Edit: I don't understand the downvotes. I'm not saying that regulation is bad, just that businesses are generally anti-regulation. I'm also not saying that the California DMV should or should not regulate self-driving cars, just that the government might give them a pass.
Clearly its about the implications of the permit, not the fee to get the permit.
I also imagine light-industry manufacturers who welcome pollution controls would do so out of regard for people and families living nearby.
In fact, I think there's probably significant amounts of regulation that would be non-controversial to business owners, and not merely intended to "keep out fresh competition".
How do you keep regulations fair and enforceable?
Waiting until someone becomes poisoned and using the legal system to fix the issue just seems bafflingly short-sighted.
Regulation merely enforces your assumption. Common sense to one can be revelation to another. You'd be surprised how many cheap food outlets skip basic hygenic procedures, such as washing produce before serving.
If that is the real reason then maybe, but for instance where I live it is doubtful that that is the only reason. There are so many rules we have to comply with as a restaurant that blatantly point to protection of big companies that go under the name 'satefy' that I for one do not welcome them at all. 1% of those rules would prevent to sicken the public, the rest is just to protect big booze, meat, fish etc vendors.
There are a whole bunch of food safety regulations. Most of these are good, and it's really pretty awesome that most of us can purchase and eat food from a restaurant without risking sickness. It's virtually certain that without these regulations there would be a race to the bottom.
You may want to update your confidence. Most of SE Asia has no hygiene laws for restaurants and yet tourists flock and rarely does anything terrible result.
Why would restaurant eating be a race to a bottom? It already can't compete on cost with cooking at home.
Please cite your sources.
Either way, here's my offering to your noble cause:
orIt's pretty obvious there are no enforced hygiene laws in any of those countries.
My experience living in a developing nation with little to no sanitation regulation: people there got sick regularly and accepted it as part of life, e.g. "don't get the frozen pre-made food from that market, it'll make you sick." And they said that it's common to get food poisoning a couple times a year. So, not a weekly occurrence, but not all that rare.
(I was living in a former Soviet republic for a little over a year, and became good friends with several people who'd lived there their entire lives.)
I can't remember when I last had food poisoning here in the U.S.
This is the equivalent of Uber deciding not to pay its federal taxes. Sure, it could concoct a theory that the corporate income tax "doesn't apply to Uber", and in theory there's a possibility that the IRS might somehow agree. In practice, however, there is none.
The major difference here is simply that the penalties for failing to pay taxes are well-defined and severe, while the penalties for failing to obtain a state permit for autonomous vehicle testing are not. Uber is betting on the eventual penalties for their (flagrant and straightforward) violation of these laws will end up being something they prefer over making the relevant disclosures required by the permit.
That simplistic reductionism is not true. There are concepts of civil disobedience.[1] History has shown that many laws (e.g. copyright laws, sodomy laws, Jim Crow laws) are more like an ongoing dialogue/battle between the citizens and government for universal compliance. Other laws such as homocide seem more stable for straightforward compliance without controversy.
The DMV didn't write the autonomous vehicle laws -- they are interpreting it -- to their benefit. Likewise, Uber didn't write the law either, they are also interpreting it -- to their benefit.
Those 2 interpretations differ. I have no idea who is "more correct" in their interpretation. The DMV may have the last word and win. We don't know yet.
>This is the equivalent of Uber deciding not to pay its federal taxes.
No, the analogy is somebody disagreeing with a government agency's interpretation of the law. An example would be a taxpayer who disagreed with IRS and won the case.[2]
It's similar to one entity claiming that early VCR users taping shows were "breaking the law."[3] If VCR consumers and Sony disagree and say it's "fair use", responding to that with "copyright laws apply to everybody regardless" doesn't actually analyze the differing interpretations. Eventually, the consumers and Sony got the Supreme Court to agree with their interpretation by a very close 5-4 majority ruling.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/arts/design/tax-court-rul...
[3] Betamax "fair use" Supreme Court ruling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
Self-driving functionality, at least for the time being, is a tool used by a human operator to achieve their objectives with regard to the vehicle. This is distinct from a vehicle with no driver, for which regulation is obviously necessary. It's no different from a pilot using autopilot. If someone wanted to make an unmanned passenger plane, there'd need to be huge regulatory changes (not saying it's necessarily a good idea), but pilots use autopilot all the time without great regulatory upheaval, because it's just a tool the pilot is using to fly the plane as they wish.
So long as a human operator is in control of, and responsible for, the vehicle, it shouldn't matter in particular what method they use to operate it.
The use of "autopilot" in aviation is not without controversy, and there are a number of schools of thought on the spectrum between "it saves lives" and "it dumbs down pilots and kills people". FWIW, the FAA at least requires a functioning autopilot (or "automatic altitude control system") when flying in RVSM airspace, or the altitude where most commercial jets fly, so regulation is on the side of automation here.
"any vehicle equipped with technology that has the capability of operating or driving the vehicle without the active physical control or monitoring of a natural person..." [1]
Seems like Uber is right as long as their cars can't function without drivers, which is probably true.
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/d48f347b-8815-458e...
As in not turning the steering wheel or pushing the gas or break pedals? Because that sounds like what Uber's Self Driving car does. (Even on the promotional videos, the "drivers"/testers are not turning the steering wheel.
> without the active physical control or monitoring of a natural person...
Its the physical control OR monitoring of a human. Ubers cars may not require [human] active physical control, but it does require monitoring of a human and so this doesn't apply to Ubers cars.
And this disagreement isn't a necessarily a bad thing; I think the regulation is unclear, and in such cases the only way to "clarify" it is to wait for the regulating body to sue you and have both sides present their arguments in court. (You can't just ask them to clarify it, as they have no obligation to respond).