How else would you suggest that society could make sure that people driving vehicles on public roadways have at least some basic knowledge of how to safely operate a motor vehicle? The honor system?

At the boundary between your private land and the public road system.

It's not clear what the distinction you are trying to make is. What is the significant difference between "a privilege" and "a right subject to safety regulations", exactly? Call it what you want, either way you are allowed to drive as long as you follow the traffic laws, but if you abuse the right/privilege, it can be taken away from you.

To give one example: chronic drunk drivers can have their licenses revoked. After that, they can no longer drive, and therefore are no longer a danger to the public.

As always, there are trade-offs to be made between freedom and safety. You clearly lean towards the "freedom" side, and that's fine, but society is not required to share your opinion about where the best place is to draw that line.

Walking and (to a lesser extent) bicycling are inherently less hazardous to other people, in that there is less mass moving less quickly in areas where other people might be. As a consequence, walking and bicycling are less heavily regulated than driving.

That said, there are also regulations governing walking and bicycling -- bicyclists have to obey traffic laws when on public roads, the same as any other vehicle, and even pedestrians are forbidden to jaywalk.

You seem to think that if there is a right to do something, then that activity cannot be regulated by the government for safety reasons. The law (and common sense) disagree with you.

Actually I think that avoiding unexpected road hazards will be the self-driving car's strong point. A car can be watching in all directions, all the time, and can react within a few milliseconds to avoid a collision. Computing the best way to react is not a terribly difficult problem either, since all you need is a reasonable physics model in which the car can play out the likely results of each of its various options, and then choose the option that looks like it will yield the best result. (if you want to imagine what driving is like for a computer, imagine that time was slowed down by a factor of 1,000. You'd find that driving was more like chess and less like an arcade game)

I think the difficult parts for a self-driving car will be the parts involving communication with other human beings -- e.g. noticing that the traffic cop in the intersection is signaling that the car should stop (or go) now, or that the road cones placed between two lanes are meant to indicate that the right lane is currently closed to traffic. Compared to that, getting collision-avoidance-physics right will be fairly straightforward.

Actually, there is a clear bright line, and that line is the "public" in "public roads".

If you are on your own private property, you are free to drive/ride/bike however you want to. You can race non-street-legal cars at 300 miles per hour while drunk, blindfolded, nude, and not wearing a seat belt, if that's what you feel like doing.

The public road system, on the other hand, is not your personal plaything. You share it with everyone else, and as such your rights to the use of the public roads stop where other peoples' rights to that same road system start. In particular, you do not have the right to endanger other peoples' lives or property. The various rules and restrictions on how/where/who can drive all follow logically from that.

The pragmatic answer is that some regulation of the roads is necessary in order to avoid bloodshed and chaos.

Originally there were no laws restricting how people could use their automobiles on the public roads.

Then certain people started causing problems by driving recklessly, not maintaining their vehicles, driving drunk, etc, and they were causing unacceptable levels of damage to other people and property.

To address the problem, people came up with laws to regulate driving in order to make the streets tolerably safe for everyone.

As you've probably noticed, the real world is driven more by necessity, than by abstract ideological principles. The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

More likely, you and the parent poster are using different definitions of "fully autonomous". You might want to compare notes on that.

A self-driving car does not have to be perfect. It just has to be better than the alternative.

Isn't the fact that motor vehicles are already the number one killer in the US annually actually an argument for automated cars?

Five centuries of work before that never perfected heavier-than-air flying machines either, until one year, presto, all the necessary preconditions were finally met and airplanes became a reality. There's nothing linear about progress.

Where I come from, a solar system is defined as the union of one sun and a few planets.

We don't go in for that kinky multi-stellar shit.

Indeed. Once I learned about confirmation bias, I started to see examples of it everywhere. ;^)

One good reason is that any outbreak of open war would very likely result in the immediate deaths of tens of thousands of South Koreans in Seoul. The South Korean capital is only 35 miles from the North Korean border, and the North Korean government is relying on a sort of mutually-assured-destruction strategy there to deter foreign attacks.

You can turn in your man card at the desk on the way out.

Wah. Allowing some stranger dictate to you what you must do or be, based on his own arbitrary conception of masculinity, is a pretty spineless way to live.

Actually, making tools and organizing labor is we're really good at. I personally have never killed anything larger than a bug in my life; I suspect a lot of other people haven't either. I've never had to, because there have always been other people who are willing to do those unpleasant tasks for me, in exchange for modest amounts of money.

Granted, I could learn those skills (and others) if I had to, but it would probably take me some days or weeks before I got good at it. It's not clear I would survive long enough to learn them.

So yes, humanity is the most deadly predator the planet has ever had. Any particular human being, OTOH, most likely is not -- we're more likely to be the most effective C++ programmer the planet has ever had, or the best Fedex deliveryman, or some other not-so-helpful-during-the-zombie-apocalypse skill.

How long would it take the 95% to eliminate (or convert, if you prefer) most of the 5%?