History Repeats Itself with the First Robot Roadtrip

In 1903, Horatio Jackson, Sewall Crocker, and their dog, Bud, drove across the nation and into the history books, becoming the first team to successfully make the transcontinental trip from San Francisco to New York City. Last week marked another historic, continent wide expedition, although this time the Delphi Automotive team's traveling companion wasn't a dog, but a robot chauffer. A driverless car, starting from the Golden Gate Bridge, safely traveled the intervening 3,500 miles to arrive just in time for the New York International Auto Show.

It's hard to downplay this accomplishment, but feats such as these - and the potential benefits they herald - require an atmosphere of intellectual freedom to achieve.

If autonomous vehicles can navigate the impending bureaucracy and enter widespread use, the greatest benefit they offer is vastly improved roadway safety. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration reported nearly 33,000 fatalities from motor vehicle crashes in 2013. Another 2.3 million people were injured in 5.7 million total traffic accidents. Meanwhile, driver error has been found to be the cause in nearly 95 percent of crashes.

Autonomous vehicle instruments are not distracted by phone conversations, following GPS directions or an attractive person strutting down the sidewalk. The computer's decisions and reactions are not dulled by sleep deprivation or insobriety. While there may be some aspects of driving in which humans retain an advantage, autonomous vehicles offer the opportunity to fix a very large part of what we often get tragically wrong.

Increased personal convenience is another key benefit to autonomous vehicles. The Census Bureau estimates that Americans annually spend over 23.5 billion hours driving to work (over 210 hours per person). This is time that could be recovered and used for productive or recreational purposes if autonomous vehicle usage became widespread. Imagine family vacations where getting there was actually part of the fun!

A third important outcome of widespread autonomous vehicle adoption would be its potential for changing our transportation structure and the use of space, especially in urban areas. Most of a vehicle's time is spent idle, but autonomous technology offers the potential to more efficiently use this under-utilized asset. Each vehicle would have the potential to serve as a robot cab, meaning that the total number of vehicles needed to meet a city's demand for transportation could be reduced, along with urban congestion and parking capacity.

The benefits that autonomous vehicles offer are difficult to overstate, for both individuals and society as a whole, but these benefits are threatened by regulatory legislation that has already been proposed in 28 state legislatures. Google already warned the California Department of Motor Vehicles that requiring certain safety technology be built into autonomous vehicles could restrict better safety innovations in the future. In addition, there is always the potential for regulatory capture by special interests attempting to direct the regulation for their own benefit.

Regulation of autonomous vehicles - or other technological advances - is not intrinsically a bad thing. There are both appropriate and inappropriate uses for every kind of technology. However, lawmakers should resist the urge to use the "precautionary principle" approach when considering regulation. The precautionary principle creates a stifling atmosphere for innovation by requiring a "Mother, may I?" attitude from entrepreneurs.

We need to provide visionaries with an environment of "permissionless innovation" - what scholars like my colleague Adam Thierer describe as "the general freedom to experiment with new technologies and business models" - in order to develop the life-changing innovations the rest of us will enjoy. Permissionless innovation encourages experimentation and discovery within the constraint of established legal frameworks that already protect each person from the negligence of others.

This triumph of modern technology is driven by the vision of innovators and fueled by the demand of the public for progress that enhances the quality of life. Without both halves of the equation - the genius of the inventors and the reward offered to them for their efforts - new developments such as these aren't possible. And in many cases future advances cannot be predicted based on the perspective of the past. As Steve Jobs said: "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."

Jackson, Crocker and Bud didn't ask for permission to drive beyond the limits of the paved roads available in 1903, and our modern pioneering innovators shouldn't have to either.