The limits of the law continue to stretch. In 2015, I wrote about Salim Ismail and a Life-Changing Seminar in Orlando (May 2015). He noted repeatedly that regulators and legislators will always struggle to keep up with technology. The innovators and inventors are too nimble, the revolutions come too rapidly, and foreseeing the future is challenging.
That post was about the NCCI Annual Issues Symposium. I was privileged to speak at it a few years later. My topic? Technology that is changing our world. I was convinced then that bots and droids were coming. I have often felt vindicated by breaking news of our realization of those various predictions in recent years.
Multiple outlets reported in 2025 about an incident in which a Jaguar made an illegal u-turn in front of a San Bruno, California, police car. A short pursuit ensued, and the Jaguar reportedly stopped dutifully. The challenge came when the police officers found the Jaguar was a Waymo robotaxi. There was no driver on board with whom to ask all the routine and pertinent questions.
License and registration, please.
Do you know why I pulled you over today?
Did you see the "no U-turn" sign?
Ignore that the answers to these questions really do not change the outcome in any event. Whether you saw the sign, can guess the motivation, or not, you are likely getting a ticket for making that turn. But, the $64,000 question is how to ticket a computer (or perhaps how to talk with one successfully).
The San Bruno police posted on FacePlace and explained the absence of a driver. They explained that their ticket "books don't have a box for 'robot.'" Possibly, the police were joking; police are notorious for their sense of humor. Or, perhaps they are literalists who truly defer to such semantics (try that "I identify as a robot" defense the next time you are pulled over).
The news reports that California is now striving to "allow officers to report these traffic violations" with a new law taking effect in 2026. Nonetheless, there is no penalty included in the law. As originally introduced, it would have allowed ticketing the vehicle (essentially adding that "robot" box).
The legislation, according to The Guardian, also requires the robo-car operators to provide "emergency phone lines" for use by first responders who experience challenges. The first responders will be able to "order a company to move autonomous vehicles out of an area" within two minutes or to have those vehicles avoid some area.
In the end, law enforcement will have to evolve. The standby "license and registration" will simply not suffice in an age in which computers have been delegated to operate heavy equipment. Their training and decision-making will likely be more regimented and appropriate than our own.
And yet, they will not be perfect. At times, they may behave as irrationally as humans are able to. There have been examples of systemic failures. These have included Waymo. But there is an online list of the issues alleged for the robotaxi generally. Some have been published in videos.
The easy conclusion is that these driverless cars are not perfect. They pose risks for those in them and the world through which they travel. Nonetheless, with 7 million miles driven, NBC reports that "drivers are nine times more likely to be involved in an injury-causing crash compared to Waymo’s fleet of driverless vehicles."
In other words, there is some evidence that the robo danger is no more than the human danger. Nonetheless, we may struggle as a species to accept that computers are not perfect, despite being better than we are at various tasks.
But that returns us merely to the initial quandary. Who gets the ticket, pays the fine, and perhaps at some point loses the privilege of driving?
