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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

I really didn't expect this to happen within 10 years. I'm amazed that this happened so fast.

This is an example of the beauty of American federalism. The states can push forward with innovation, as appropriate to their local needs.

Well, the technology has been nearly there for over a decade. The problems are all legal. The obvious part was that automated cars are illegal to begin with. Less obviously, the liability situation is unclear: who would be willing to accept liability for the driverless car? The company that makes it would be at a huge risk at the mass market stage, because there would be many cars. Therefore, they would be unwilling. The passenger has no control over the car, so they would likewise be unwilling. The state could do it, but this is unlikely. The accident victim could be stuck with it, but this is unacceptable.

So, who takes the liability?

How about the State requiring each car owner to have insurance which would cover to $X all damage caused by the car AND the State also limit claims to $X.[1]

The insurance companies with their phalanxes of clever quants can work out how dangerous each car model is and price it accordingly. Adam Smith's invisible hand can do the rest.

If the insurance companies get greedy and "certainly not conspire" to price high, then the car makers would be free to spin up their own correctly priced insurance companies and take the business in order allow car sales.

[1] Barring malice and probably a dozen other exceptions.

Insurance companies can see how reliable these things have become, and they know how bad humans are at driving. Insurers will probably start mandating automation (or offering incentives) in the next 5-7 years.

Exactly, if these cars are statistically safer the insurance companies will notice that in a very few years. And then they will strongly encourage drivers, or should I say car owners, to get these.

Especially if you are in a demographic the car insurance companies consider risky, you'll get to choose between paying A LOT to dive yourself, or a hell of a lot less to have the car drive you.

I did. You know why? Because there's no way Google would announce a technology that they think would be used 10 years from now.

I knew it right away that if they announced it now, then they're doing it to get public support and then convince politicians to allow them as soon as possible.

They also wouldn't have announced it if it didn't already work pretty well.They wouldn't have announced it if it still needed 10 more years of work.

I did my Masters in machine learning and I'm honestly not really sure how technically feasible human-level driving is. Particularly things like intersections where traffic lights get obscured by a tree or the power outages, or things where people arrive at intersections at the same time and there is subtle communication between the drivers for who is allowing who to go first.

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."

Money. Google has oodles of it - governments only exist to gain money (and power) -- so it was pretty obvious (to me) that this would happen quickly.

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