Regulating Autonomous Vehicles: A Policy Proposal

The widespread deployment and testing of autonomous vehicles in real-world environments raises key questions about how such systems should be regulated. Much of the current debate presupposes that the regulatory system we currently use for regular vehicles is also appropriate for semiand fully-autonomous ones. In opposition, we first argue that there are serious challenges to regulating autonomous vehicles using current approaches, due to the nature of both autonomous capabilities (and their connections to operational domains), and also the systems’ tasks and surrounding uncertainties. Instead, we argue that vehicles with autonomous capabilities are similar in key respects to drugs and other medical interventions. Thus, we propose (on a “first principles” basis) a dynamic regulatory system with staged approvals and monitoring, analogous to the system used by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. We provide details about the operation of such a potential system, and conclude by characterizing its benefits, costs, and plausibility.