The adaptation of law based on self-driving cars

                After a long day of work at the office, Steve plops down in his car and says “Take me home Jarvis.”  The car pulls out of the parking lot and navigates down the road onto the highway.  Steve pulls out his phone in his left hand and starts talking to his friend about how terrible his day at work is.  While on the highway, Steve passes by a police car and uses his other hand to wave at him.  The police officer nods in response as the person with no hands on the wheel passes by… wait what?

                With the advent of self-driving cars one must now consider, how will laws regarding driving habits and driving licenses change?  My answer, I’ve found that the more I think about these issue the more questions appear.

                The first of these issues would be the driver’s license.  With the emergence of a new technology that allows a car to drive itself, will people still require a driver’s license to drive?  Will people still need to learn how to manually drive cars or will driving manual be banned?  Will our driver’s education be changed to incorporate training to operating a self-driving car or will there be a separate license for self-driving vehicles?  If it is the former, then it would require ever driver to retake some sort of driver’s test to operate one of these cars.  If it’s the latter, then the issue arises where drivers with self-driving licenses are still in cars that can be driven manually.  Our current system for determining who is eligible to “drive” a car would be very inadequate and must change in some way to accommodate this change.

                The second issue would involve driving habits that would normally get you pulled over.  If you are in a self-driving vehicle, would the person in the driver’s seat still be required to keep his or her eyes on the road or would they be free to talk on their phones or even play video games?  Would you still be pulled over for being intoxicated while in the driver’s seat of one of these cars?  Finally, how will law enforcement officers differentiate between self-driving cars and regular cars?  When a police officer sees a person who is distracted by their phone or other device while driving, they would pull that person over to give him or her a ticket, but with self-driving cars, will police officers still have the authority to pull ever one of these cars over?  One means of solving this problem could be incorporating some sort of light signal on self-driving cars to indicate if it is currently in auto-pilot mode thus giving the driver immunity to the responsibility of paying attention to the road.  Of course there are many negatives to this as well, such as creating a false signal to avoid police attention and such.

                In the end, the advent of public self-driving cars will open a Pandora’s box of moral and legal issues that must be resolved.  Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the beginning, I really don’t have any answers to these issues, only more questions.