It Will Soon be Easy for Self-Driving Cars to Hide in Plain Sight. We Shouldn't Let Them.

upstart writes:

If they ever hit our roads for real, other drivers need to know exactly what they are:

It will soon become easy for self-driving cars to hide in plain sight. The rooftop lidar sensors that currently mark many of them out are likely to become smaller. Mercedes vehicles with the new, partially automated Drive Pilot system, which carries its lidar sensors behind the car's front grille, are already indistinguishable to the naked eye from ordinary human-operated vehicles.

[...] We could argue that, on principle, humans should know when they are interacting with robots. [...] If self-driving cars on public roads are genuinely being tested, then other road users could be considered subjects in that experiment and should give something like informed consent. Another argument in favor of labeling, this one practical, is that-as with a car operated by a student driver-it is safer to give a wide berth to a vehicle that may not behave like one driven by a well-practiced human.

There are arguments against labeling too. A label could be seen as an abdication of innovators' responsibilities, implying that others should acknowledge and accommodate a self-driving vehicle. And it could be argued that a new label, without a clear shared sense of the technology's limits, would only add confusion to roads that are already replete with distractions.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.