Regulators gonna regulate: The sharing economy, drones, and now driverless cars

“Permissionless innovation” this is not (via the WSJ):

Autonomous vehicles are still far from being offered for sale. But regulators in California, home to developers including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Tesla Motors Inc., are taking the unusual step of developing regulations for the vehicles as the industry moves closer through features including automatic braking.

California’s proposed regulations would require consumers to get a special state-issued driver’s certificate after receiving training from a car company on how to use a driverless vehicle. Autonomous cars also would have to pass a test administered by a third party before being sold. Automakers would only be allowed to lease driverless cars, as opposed to selling them outright.

The draft rules pose a potential problem for Alphabet and its emerging self-driving car business. They require a driver capable of taking control of the vehicle. However, the company’s latest prototype initially had no steering wheel or pedals. In California, Alphabet has had to put temporary controls in the vehicles because the state already required drivers be able to take control. The draft regulations released on Wednesday cover the public’s use of self-driving cars in the state, rather than during tests.

New Autopilot features are demonstrated in a Tesla Model S during a Tesla event in Palo Alto, California October 14, 2015. REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach.

And Alphabet-Google’s response:

In developing vehicles that can take anyone from A to B at the push of a button, we’re hoping to transform mobility for millions of people, whether by reducing the 94 percent of accidents caused by human error or bringing everyday destinations within reach of those who might otherwise be excluded by their inability to drive a car. Safety is our highest priority and primary motivator as we do this. We’re gravely disappointed that California is already writing a ceiling on the potential for fully self-driving cars to help all of us who live here.

I can’t see these rules being anything more than temporary, should they ever take effect. Look, one reason to require human drivers would be so they could take the wheel in some sort of emergency. Here is the problem with that kind of thinking: Automation can lead to “de-skilling” of human operators, especially for the rare situations where they might be required to step in. As one pilot said during the 2009 investigation into the crash of Air France flight 447, “Computers make great monitors for people, but people make poor monitors for computers.”

This is from the book “Human Error” by James Reason:

Manual control is a highly skilled activity, and skills need to be practiced continuously in order to maintain them. Yet an automatic control system that fails only rarely denies operators the opportunity for practicing these basic control skills. One of the consequences of automation, therefore, is that operators become de-skilled in precisely those activities that justify their marginalized existence. But when manual takeover is necessary something has usually gone wrong; this means that operators need to be more rather than less skilled in order to cope with these atypical conditions.

Drivers today may not be at risk of losing their skills honed over years behind the wheel. But what of the next generation? Ashwin Parameswaran on this issue and the broader challenges of automation:

An experienced driver today is probably competent enough to monitor a self-driving car but what about a driver twenty years from today who will likely not have spent any meaningful amount of time driving a manual car? An experienced teacher today is probably good enough to extract good results from a classroom where so much of the process of instruction and evaluation are automated but what about the next generation of teachers? An experienced soldier or pilot with years of real combat experience is probably competent enough to manage a fleet of drones but what about the next generation of combat soldiers whose only experience of warfare is through a computer screen?

Regulators gonna regulate: The sharing economy, drones, and now driverless cars