Reading 11

The motivation behind developing and building self-driving cars in my opinion is to improve car safety and efficiency. I think that self driving cars can be helpful in many different ways depending on how you look at it. From a social perspective, self driving cars can free some people up to three hours of driving back and forth every day. From a safety perspective, self driving cars would help reduce the amount of traffic accidents that happen daily. Lastly from an environmental perspective, self driving cars can reduce the amount of fuel being burnt and therefore preventing more carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere. All of these things are reasonable reasons behind the motivation of building self driving cars.

 

I believe it is very well possible that self driving electric cars will be on the road some day in the near future. I cannot say exactly when that can be possible because like anything and everything self driving cars surely will come with pros and cons that we will have to deal with. Reducing the amount of accidents cannot be assured because there is no technology without flaws. I think it is very very important that when the time comes that self driving cars are released they are produced with no idea in mind that something could possibly go wrong. People agree and disagree on whether the cars should be programmed to minimize casualties even if it causes the death of the rider.

 

I think that programmers should address this situation in an ethical way. One example is that self driving cars with a passenger should avoid crashing into a populated area and instead maneuver the way out risking to crash elsewhere. I think that a self driving car when designed will have the ability to decide the best possible solution to any situation. Whether or not that will save the life of the person in the car is questionable and a reason to why many people don’t agree with self driving cars. My solution and response to this is that every day people continue to put their life at risk when they are on the road and don’t notice it. It is impossible to completely eliminate the chances of casualties when it is already at an all time high.

 

I think that self driving cars will impact society, economics, and the government in a positive way.  Self driving cars will allow us to eliminate the time we take out of our days to drive. If you truly think about it, driving is the only way we are able to do some of the things we do now-a-days. Take for example the fact that my internship is two hours away from my home. Suppose I had a self driving car, that would mean I had 4 extra hours every day to do my work or rest. Also driving for two hours can be extremely tiring and therefore increases the risk of crashing. Remember when Uber first came out and everyone was amazed by prices and time it took to get places. Well you can think of self driving cars the same way, except there is no driver!

 

Of course the government will get priority to using and building self driving cars which is important if we want the protection we ask for in these vehicles. Also I believe the government will be up for a long run in regulating and designing the operational scale of the self driving cars on the streets. When self driving cars become an option and people have already experimented and proven that the self driving cars are safe and usable on the road I will definitely consider having one. This does not mean that I will abandon my car, because to someone like me driving cars is almost just as good as owning cars. Either way this wouldn’t be a one-day decision, and I think I would really think and research about it before I was to purchase and use one.