[blibble]

so they can't induce movement of the vehicle, at all, ever?

that's probably fine then

but if they can at all: they need a driving license

it is not unreasonable for a state to want to control who is allowed to move around 1.5 tonnes of metal in a public environment

[offnominal]

This is analogous to a situation where a passenger in a vehicle, for example, asks the driver to pull over or to drive to a given spot. I believe the passenger does not need to have a driving license to perform this task.

[dekhn]

I have no specific knowledge of the law or the tech requirements here, but I don't think that the state of CA makes Google get CA driving licenses for its phillipines service employees.

[atq2119]

There may be an is/ought confusion in your exchange.

It is probably true that California has no such law today. It's also true that regulation always takes a while to catch up to technological advances, and so there is a useful, separate conversation to be had about whether California (and anywhere else) ought to have such a law.

[dekhn]

To be clear, California's legislators are paying close attention to Waymo, both because it's being deployed in their major cities, and because Alphabet is a California company.

Depending on which legislator you listen to, Waymo is either the devil that is constantly running people and cats down everywhere, or savior that will rapidly replace all human drivers because it's safer. At least for now, they are keeping a fairly light touch on the legislation for self-driving cars, both because they want to see the technology expand without unnecessary regulation, and because they want to know what the baseline fatality rate is compared to humans.

Likely when the image is clearer (personally I expect that self-driving will expand to all major US cities, and also demonstrate that it is safer than humans) they will find some regulation around remote operator qualifications.

[catlikesshrimp]

For the time being, they have a free colorless "foreign inept CSR which we don't employ" card when something happen; something always happens given enough time.