"California safety regulations currently require operators to be "stationed" at the controls."

This is NOT a huge burden. Any robotics company operating a fleet today will have someone watching almost all the time in one form or another anyways. So this really just becomes a matter of interpreting what "the controls" means. The regulation seem to omit any mention of "on the device/vehicle" so these controls can clearly be remote. It also doesn't seem to specify a 1:1 ratio of operators to devices. So if there is one operator, e.g., at the air-conditioned HQ of the robotics vendor, at the "controls" of twenty tractors that are operating in the field which the operator can see remotely using low-latency video-streaming and which he can stop instantly with the press of a button, then that might already be all that is required. It certainly is logically.

"[John Deere autonomous] tractors are currently being used by farmers in 11 states but not California."

And what of the other 38 states?

The graphic shows those tractors are also not adopted in Texas, Montana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Tennessee, all top 10 farming states by acreage. [0]

California is an ironic example due to its tech industry, but hardly seems like something specific to "dysfunctional" California, as suggested by other commenters.

[0] https://www.agriculture.com/farming-across-america-a-state-b...

Seems kind of silly, but at the same time, with the width of modern combines and tractor implements, it isn't really a big deal. The labor cost of people driving a row crop tractor or combine is barely even a blip in the cost of food. I would be surprised if this even came out represent even a single percentage of food costs for row crops.

Typical example of how bureaucracy and over-regulation stifles productivity and innovation.

Many such cases.

It’s no coincidence that the industries that have seen the most explosive growth and added the most value to the economy have also been the least regulated ones (e.g. software).

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