There's a catch-22 in deciding safe driving behavior.

I think I'd prefer everyone being technologically conservative with respect to driver distraction. Until something can be shown to not be a dangerous distractions, drivers can't have it. When we ban things after they prove to be a distraction, that usually means we proved them a distraction via a body count. Waiting for a hundred or a thousand people to die so that you have statistical certainty is the shittiest kind of science.

This is a bit of a catch-22, because we're pretty piss-poor at proving the negative, that things aren't a distraction. We're still way more paranoid about electronics on an airplane than most people think we need to be.

What should happen -- in my opinion, and for all I know what does happen in some situations -- is a series of trials. First, laboratory, simulation-based trials. If drivers in a simulation are distracted by a new gizmo -- GPS, dash-mounted phone, Glass, car console, whatever -- we can eliminate it there, with zero people dying. Then and only then, if we have reason to believe no one will die because of it, we can have real-world trials, followed by approval for the general population.

Obviously, this would suck for early Glass adopters, since it would likely take a year plus to complete good trials, but you could approve broad classes of devices and fast-track similar devices in the future.

> When we ban things after they prove to be a distraction, that usually means we proved them a distraction via a body count. Waiting for a hundred or a thousand people to die so that you have statistical certainty is the shittiest kind of science.

I don't know. You make this sound really bad, but isn't this how a lot of science works? How do we know if a medical treatment doesn't have disasterous side effects? Sure, we start by assuming it's safe, and maybe we test on animals to gain some confidence, but at the end of the day you can't really be sure until people have tried the treatment.

Obviously, there are other safer ways to study whether things distract drivers. Perhaps we could use driving simulators to test reaction time. I probably should have worded my comment differently, and asked for proof that Google Glass makes drivers quantifiably more distracted or less reactive rather than asking directly for proof of a higher accident rate.