Calling Rob Reich, [1] calling Rob Reich . . .
Self-driving cars?? Right there at Stanford University, whence emanate your advanced theories of controlling kids to set them free [2]?

Homeschooling should not be banned, but regulated much more vigilantly.

Not to mention the intellectual cradle of your Stanford-educated colleague Kimberly Yuracko [3], who quotes your theories so um, liberally -- or illiberally, both, neither? -- as spitshine for her own Stanford-servile theory that home education is a public function from which government is required to protect all children [4]. (Did you two go pub-crawling while she was a student, to swap collegial notes on these elaborate fantasy worlds you both had under construction, like CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien [5]?)

It says right there in the news, “The idea of a self-driving car is a really big idea that will have a big impact on society.” [6]

Only if society is asleep at the switch, and that's where you come in, quick! There's still time to cook up some kind of ethical servility theory to stop it. Maybe use your homeschool regulation screed as a template, here, we'll help --
Society can't ethically empower individual kids with such transformative innovations, especially not if they actually WORK! Parents letting kids go soft with automatic transmissions and power steering was quite indulgent enough, but this is worse than how calculators almost made a mockery of government math testing as social control. Self-driving cars could "theoretically" decouple government's control of kids' lives through control of their driver licensing. Stanford professors of all people cannot be so enthusiastic and cavalier about the serious theoretical risks of outright liberty

Rob Reich, your reputation is on the line. You know what you must do. Expose your scientific colleagues as ethical slavemongers against children, for conceiving of robot computers controlling helpless (one could even say servile?) passengers -- no matter how well it works, "self-driving" is by definition unAmerican!

(damn kids need to take the city bus like we did, and support government services or all is lost . . .)

By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times June 15, 2007

. . . the scientists at Stanford said a new generation of technologies is on the horizon that will increasingly assist human drivers in operating their vehicles. “Why are we doing this? We all know automobiles are unsafe and inefficient,” said Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford faculty member who was one of the designers of the Volkswagen Touareg autonomous vehicle, named Stanley, that won the contest in 2005.

“The idea of a self-driving car is a really big idea that will have a big impact on society.”

(crossposted at Snook [7].)

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