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> I would be stunned if we agreed to eliminate human drivers from the road in my lifetime

It basically happened for horses.

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Did it? I did a cursory search and it seems like many places still permit horse-drawn carriages, just not on limited access highways. Sometimes with fairly onerous licensing and operational requirements (speed limits, poo management, etc), but still allowed.
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I think that will be how human-driven cars are in 30(?) years. Rare, but allowed with restrictions.
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Horses don't vote.
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Neither do cars?
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Drivers, however, absolutely do. And I do not see enough drivers voting away their own ability to drive any time soon.
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A few years ago I would have (and did) considered the notion that manually programming was about to turn into a quaint relic and computers would be writing 90%+ of code preposterous. Once an alternative becomes obviously superior things can change very fast.
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Right, I was pointing out that at some point there was probably a horse-rider constituency as there is a driver constituency today.
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Is that:

- I would be stunned if we agree to eliminate human drivers from 100% of roads in the lifetime of anyone alive today.

or

- I would be stunned if we agree to eliminate human drivers from 10% of roads...

...or is there some other percentage to qualify this? I guess I wouldn't expect there to be a decree that makes it happen all at once for a country. Especially a large country like the U.S.. More like, some really dense city will decide to make a tiny core autonomous vehicles only, and then some other cities also do years later. And then maybe it expands to something larger than just the core after 5 or 10 years. And so on...

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That is a fair point, since it is fairly safe to make "this absolute claim will never happen." And the person I replied to did say 'exclusively', which implies 100% elimination of human drivers. But still, I appreciate your nuance.

And in the spirit of that nuance, I will revise my statement slightly. I think it is entirely possible we will eliminate drivers on 10% of roads. We have rules that are analogous to that already with limited access highways. Though I would rate this still as unlikely, since such roads only make up just over 1% of all the roads in the US as it is. Not sure what the % is for other countries, probably less.

> some really dense city will decide to make a tiny core autonomous vehicles only

Agree 100%, this kind of thing I do expect to see happen. We already have exclusions for cars altogether in favor of pedestrians, so the precedent is set.

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