When the device is a giant robot arm or a laser cutter, there are huge amounts of regulation-- you may have to get permission from your municipality to operate it even within the confines of your own facility.
Make it look like a car, however, ...
Cars and roads are kind of nuts, but they're established lunacy at least.
R.I.P. Elaine Herzberg.
Drunk drivers are killers. People that text and drive are killers. People that get kicked by their kid and turn around for a second to yell at them are killers.
I'll take an unfatigable, indistractable, computer that literally has eyes in the back of its head, and on the side of its head, and the front, and can bounce radar under cars, etc over the pitiful example of a "safe (human) driver" we have now.
Yes, friend, and when we have those so will I.
Those (as yet still fictional) robot cars (and can we PLEASE call them "auto-autos"!?) are not the problem.
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> Drunk drivers are killers. People that text and drive are killers. ...
Yes, and it's arguably fucking crazy that we let them do that. The whole reason is a deliberate campaign to normalize the carnage: "speed demons" were replaced by "jay walkers" and now more people (in the USA) have been killed by cars than by all the wars we've fought.
"The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime (Adam Ruins Everything)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM
Anyhow, "people kill people so my robots should be allowed to kill people too." Is not a valid argument IMO.
memory leaks, priority inversions, dropped packets / data. Lots of ways systems can act strangely.
These robots are massive and fast, they are killers. Yet as long as they look like cars we let them run loose on public streets. It's kinda nuts. (Arguably car traffic as it's set up now is kinds nuts too, but that's a different argument.)
The obvious thing to do is start with something like a golf cart that is limited to, say, 5mph top speed, and work your way up.