"Fifty years from now, when you're looking back at your life, don't you want to be able to say you had the guts to get in the car?"

Last week I wrote about a horrible experience in a car. Keeping with the car theme, I thought this week's post will be a little lighter....

"That's right...no driver, no hands, no clue". This was a title post on Facebook this last weekend. I read about it in the paper. In California, a self-driving Waymo car made an illegal U-turn in front of the police. When they pulled the car over, there was no one to give a ticket! This caused many comments on the post--concerns and questions. It caused me to laugh:)

I love new technology. I am a firm believer that almost all new discoveries are good, but they do cause some issues. We are navigating how to monitor and regulate all these new things. I see this in my own neighborhood. Our middle school students in our neighborhood have electric bikes and scooters. Our small village is trying to figure out how to regulate these new transportation options, keeping the children safe, and satisfying the citizens of the town. Not an easy task. The police are over by us on a daily basis, talking to the kids. Without written boundaries, the police don't know how to enforce "maybes, should bes and could bes". I feel for them. Then, to confuse the children and their parents even more, each town has decided what their guidelines will be. So if a student travels down the road with his electric bike, he may encounter 2 or 3 different towns. He may be obeying the laws in one town but breaking them in another. This is tough for everyone.

Back to the driver-less car. States and towns are trying to figure out the laws for these things too. California is getting hit hard because most of the self-driving cars are starting there. I like these new cars. I think they may help our society in many ways. No, I don't think they are taking people's jobs because someone still needs to "operate" them, via remotely. But there does need to be some concrete laws for them--as much as possible.

We are now in a society that laws are a breathing, living thing. They have to change, maybe even daily, to keep up with the new discoveries. This may cause a headache to many but I think it is a challenge that is necessary. We can't bury our heads in the sand and hope this will "go away"; nor can we institute a law and say it is forever. Yup, things will be changing daily. How do we keep up? Well, in this day of wonderful technology, it should be a pretty easy task of keeping citizens updated, often, of changes in the town's ordinances and laws. As citizens, our responsibility is to keep up with these changes. Remember, you can't claim ignorance for breaking a law.

But we also need to be flexible and compassionate. Both the police, law makers, and everyday citizens need to have some empathy. Someone breaks a new law--then maybe a warning would be good enough? What if it is an "old" law but new technology? Like the self-driving car making an illegal u-turn or a kid riding his electric bike on the sidewalk, we can still show some compassion.

In the post, many people were upset about the police not giving the company of the self-driving Waymo a ticket for breaking the law. I like, better, how the police approached it. They shook their heads, laughed a little at themselves, and then posted it on social media. And I quote (our) "citation books don't have a box for 'robot'".

Good for them. My question? How did they pull the self-driving car over???