Cecilia Abadie has been in the news a lot this week. She was pulled over for speeding in California, and she was issued an additional citation for operating a motor vehicle with a video screen visible to the driver. That screen was the eye piece on her Explorer Edition Google Glass.
Following the letter of the law, this citation is valid, though Google Glass is a product which could help reduce driver distraction.
And now we stand at a legal crossroad. Laws can be handled with some flexibility, and many situations like this can be chalked up to “officer discretion”, but it’s not an institution known for rapid evolution. Changes to cultural perspectives in legal matters sometimes require generational time frames.
When positioned against the visceral pace of technological improvement, it can often feel as if new laws are obsolete before they’re even implemented. Previous generations enjoyed more staged evolution to the tools they used. A person might go most of their adult life without radical changes to how work got done. Now we can expect a near fluid progression, sometimes software and hardware updates delivering near daily minor alterations to how our technology functions.
And now Glass is caught in the crossfire. Continue reading “When Technology Evolves Faster than our Laws – Google Glass and Driving”