People are just lazy, and because we want to be lazy, we are somehow motivated to innovate and advance today’s society just on the hope of someday being lazy. That, I believe, is the primary reason behind the development of self-driving cars.
All joking aside, the two motivations for researching and constructing self-driving cars appears to be safety and convenience. Accidents involving cars are one of the leading cause of death in the United States, and taking control from humans and placing it into the hands of software would take incapacitated or illegal drivers off of the road. Even good human drivers can cause accidents due to the briefest of distractions or being tired; in comparison, programs cannot become distracted, as code, when told, will continually gather information to keep its passengers safe.
In addition to saving lives, the convenience of self-driving cars is a major motivator in their production. A multitude of people, including myself, dislike driving or become incredibly nervous while driving; a self-driving car would ease the anxiety that I have and ensure that my condition would not harm others. Also, self-driving cars would allow people to be more produce as they travel or allow them to get the sleep or rest that few people receive on a daily basis. In the same vein as convenience, shipping costs for both consumers and distributors would decrease, for companies would no longer have to pay truck drivers, who are the main transporters of goods in the country.
Even with these perks, people are vehemently against the concept of self-driving cars. On a surface level, people enjoy the freedom and control they exert while driving, and the action brews a passion in some hearts that would be missed if cars were controlled by computers. Also, hackers are a serious threat to self-driving cars, for even cars today, with their limited computer-driven systems, can be hacked to stop abruptly or swerve into traffic, endangering the passengers inside. Truck drivers and those working within the market of transportation would lose their jobs, and because transportation is one of the leading industries in America, thousands of people would be without employment.
Personal opinions aside, the main question concerning these autonomous cars is this: would they truly make our roads safer? One article states that to prove that self-driving cars are safe, they would have to drive 275 million miles without an accident, because about only about one person is killed per hundred million miles driven. To complete this test, it would take about 12 ½ years with a fleet of 100 vehicles driving 24 hours a day. This testing, however, would pay off in the long run, for the safety benefits that come with these cars, as discussed earlier, far outweigh the slippery slope arguments of hacking and the eventual robot takeover of earth. Tesla summed up this idea nicely, saying that “self-driving vehicles will play a crucial role in improving transportation safety and accelerating the world’s transition to a sustainable future.”
In the same vein of safety, the question arises as to whom to keep safe in a dilemma; programmers, when designing the car’s software would need to devise a solution to the infamous “Trolley Problem”, deciding whether to keep the passenger or those outside of the car safe. I don’t think that there is a clear-cut answer to this issue, but I think that minimizing the loss of life would be the only fair way to program the driving software. Taking into account age, personality, and “importance” are too convoluted and complex issues to incorporate into a program at this time; therefore, minimizing the loss of life would be the only objective of way of dealing with complex crashes.
In addition to life-and-death situations, another question that emerges from this topic is who would be liable in a fatal accident. In my opinion, if the user is told by the manufacturer that the car is 100 percent safe and an accident occurs, then the manufacturer should be liable for the crash. If, however, the user has some sort of control over the vehicle, i.e. not fully autonomous, then the user should be held responsible for the crash. I don’t think that the programmers should necessarily held responsible in any case; while they were the ones who developed the software, the company who created the car in the first place is responsible for performing the proper safety checks to make the car road-safe.
Self-driving cars would not only impact manufacturers and users of cars, but normalizing the autonomous vehicles would also have social and economic ramifications. On the social front, people could become even more physically and socially connected, for self-driving cars would allow users to safety contact friends and family during their drives and could allow for safer travel to remote locations. Economically speaking, Lyft believes that people won’t have a need to purchase cars anymore, for the pricing of taking a taxi would be cheap enough that people would simply rely on their services. In addition, truck drivers and the transportation business would be completely uprooted, as I have explained before.
The government would also be impacted by the universalization of self-driving cars, but honestly, I don’t think that the government would have to do much in terms of regulating them. I believe that the regulation should be done by the manufacturers, and the government, in turn, should just use the same regulations they have put in place. However, a major government change would be the production of licenses. In today’s society, licenses are commonly used as IDs, and without the need to license people to drive, the government would have to rethink their strategy concerning proofs of identification.
With all of these facts in mind, I would probably want a self-driving car. While I don’t like driving, I understand it as a necessity and don’t mind driving now, so I’m fairly indifferent on the subject of autonomous vehicles. I do very much appreciate the safety benefits they provide, and overall, I think they are a smart investment. If they would help save lives and would benefit society as a whole, then I’m totally on board.
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