Will manually-driven vehicles be outlawed in the future?

Elon Musk has made some wild claims and predictions over the years and, while it’s safe to say that he’s quite a bit smarter than most of us, some of them are pretty hard to swallow. His latest prediction is that autonomous cars will not only come to dominate the auto industry, which is actually pretty easy to imagine, but that manually driven cars will eventually be outlawed. I can see where he’s coming from but that still seems pretty far-fetched. 

Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk believes that cars you can control will eventually be outlawed in favor of ones that are controlled by robots. The simple explanation: Musk believes computers will do a much better job than us to the point where, statistically, humans would be a liability on roadways. “I don’t think we have to worry about autonomous cars, because it’s sort of like a narrow form of AI,” Musk told NVidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at the technology company’s annual developers conference today. “It would be like an elevator. They used to have elevator operators, and we developed some simple circuitry for elevators just automatically to come to the floor you’re at… the car is going to be just like that.” So what happens when we get there? Musk said that the obvious move is to outlaw driving cars. “It’s too dangerous,” Musk said. “You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.”